From the 2012 Physics Alumni Newsletter
As I mentioned above, senior Brandon Turner was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in November 2011. Just 32 Americans are selected as Rhodes Scholars each year. They study for two years at the graduate level at the University of Oxford in the U.K. Brandon was also one of three WFU students chosen to give a senior oration at the WFU Founders’ Day Convocation on Feb. 16. His talk was titled “Easy as Pi”. He also gave the only talk at the University’s Graduation Awards Ceremony the day before graduation in May.
Soham Banerjee was awarded a Fulbright Research Scholarship to support graduate studies in Germany. The Fulbright award allows Soham to study for one year at the University of Duisberg-Essen Center for Medical Biotechnology under the guidance of Dr. Matthias Epple. Their work will focus on the development of new nanostructured biomaterials for orthopedic implants and their subsequent use in a clinical setting.
Claire McLellan and Jeremy Ward were both awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. These Fellowships are for 3 years and provide each student with a $30,000 annual stipend and each student’s institution with a $10,500 annual cost-of-education allowance. Jeremy is a WFU graduate student working at the Nanotech Center under the guidance of Professor Oana Jurchescu. Claire also worked there as an undergraduate and was also under the guidance of Professor Jurchescu. Claire started graduate school at the University of California, Santa Barbara in July this year.
Katelyn Goetz received an NSF summer travel fellowship to work with Christian Kloc at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her work there this summer has been focused on the growth of crystals. She has worked with Professor Oana Jurchescu as both an undergraduate and a graduate student. Their relationship was the focus of an article in last February’s edition of Wake Forest Magazine – see http://magazine.wfu.edu/2012/02/01/katelyn-goetz-%E2%80%9911-and-professor-oana-jurchescu/.
At the 2012 International Conference on Defects in Insulating Materials the Young Researcher prize was awarded to Wake Forest graduate student Qi Li for his presentation on “First Principles Calculations of Iodine Vacancy Centers in Strontium Iodide”. Co-authors with Qi on the research are professor Richard Williams of Wake Forest, and Daniel Aberg and Babak Sadigh of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The research is important for improving the energy resolution and sensitivity of radiation detectors used in homeland security, medical molecular imaging, and high-energy physics.
Kristen Binz, (an undergraduate Physics senior) won an award for being one of the best oral presenters from SPS oral and poster sessions held on February 27th and 28th, 2012 at the annual March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Boston, MA. Kristen won for her oral presentation entitled: “Depth of focus in digital holography using semi-coherent light”. The research was carried out during the summer of 2011 by Kristen at the University of South Florida in Tampa, where she was funded by a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates summer fellowship.
Claire McLellan, Soham Banerjee, and Danny Gallagher (all undergraduate Physics seniors last academic year) won a Bronze Medal in the 2011 University Physics Competition. The competition consists of students solving an open-ended problem during a 48 hour period. The competition is international. They chose to solve the problem entitled “Shooting a Basketball for Three Points.” Of the 77 teams in the 2011 University Physics Competition, 2 teams (3%) were ranked as Gold Medal Winners, 14 teams (18%) were ranked as Silver Medal Winners, 21 teams (27%) were ranked as Bronze Medal Winners, and 40 teams (52%) were ranked as Accomplished Competitors. The 2011 University Physics Competition received official sponsorship from the American Physical Society and American Astronomical Society, which provided prizes for the gold medal winning teams.
Graham Lopez was selected for the XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) Student Engagement Program which is a 10-week program where students selected from around the country participate in projects at various high-performance computing facilities. As a result, Graham worked this summer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) on tasks related to performance comparisons for a new full-scale system with other existing NICS systems. Graham Lopez is a graduate student in the Materials Simulation Group of Professor Timo Thonhauser where he does research on computer simulations of magnetic properties of molecules and materials.
Nicholas Lepley and Greg Smith, both graduate students in Physics, and Lee Bailey, a graduate student in the Computer Science Department, received an award from The Office of Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship at WFU. They are being funded to develop software to do 3D printing, a type of rapid custom manufacturing process, to create additional visualization and display tools for their research. In addition, they hope to allow others to upload things to their website so as to provide a centralized, feature-rich, method of exchange for other designers, printers, and users of this 3D printing technology. Nicholas Lepley’s research is conducted under the guidance of Professor Natalie Holzwarth and Greg Smith’s research is conducted under the guidance of Professor David Carroll.
Two Physics graduate students, Joel Grim and Peter Diemer, won awards in the Analytical Poster category of the Twelfth Annual Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Fellow Research Day presented by the Wake Forest University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Joel Grim placed first with his poster “Scintillator proportionality: your life might depend on it!”. Joel’s work was completed under the direction of Professor Richard Williams. Peter Diemer was first runner-up with “Improving the Performance of Organic Devices by Tuning Film Morphology”. Peter’s research was conducted under the guidance of Professor Oana Jurchescu.
Three Physics Department awards were given out to students during our last colloquium of the academic year in May. Claire McLellan and Brandon Turner both received the Speas award and graduate student Corey Hewitt received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant award.