Maxwell Taub
Department: Chemistry Faculty Advisor: Xiaosong Li I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemistry, interested in theoretical and computational chemistry. Working under Xiaosong Li, my research focuses on using the principles of quantum mechanics and special relativity to study molecular systems. Heavy elements generate electrostatic potentials strong enough to accelerate nearby electrons to speeds approaching that of light. Without a relativistic treatment, the Schrödinger equation breaks down in this limit. Proper relativistic treatments are necessary to predict certain phenomena like phosphorescence, an essential process for many modern OLED and solar cell technologies. The goal of my research is to use relativistic calculations to elucidate the charge transfer dynamics upon...
Amanda Worthy
Department: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Advisor: Dr. Narjes Abbasabadi I am a 4th-year Civil Engineering (data science option) PhD student at the University of Washington and am advised by Dr. Narjes Abbasabadi. I spend the majority of my working time as energy infrastructure researcher, educator, and data scientist. I am particularly interested in making the built environment more sustainable through data-driven, performance-based analysis. My current research assesses the impact of urban climates and microclimates on building energy performance, ultimately aiming to make building energy models more accurate and reliable....
Yiwen Zheng
Department: Mechanical Engineering Advisor: Aniruddh Vashisth I am a third year PhD student in Mechanical engineering at UW advised by Dr. Aniruddh Vashisth. My research focuses on designing and understanding recyclable polymers (also known as vitrimers) by molecular dynamics simulations and machine learning models. By gaining insights into the structure-property relationships and self-healing mechanisms of vitrimers, we hope to widen the potential applications of these sustainable polymers and reduce the energy cost in plastics production and recycling....
Trager Joswig-Jones
Department: Electrical & Computer Engineering Advisor: Baosen Zhang During my CEI Graduate Fellowship, my research will focus on improving how we control and analyze electrical power systems that use inverters with renewable energy sources like solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. Inverters help convert the power from these resources into a form that works with our electrical power grid. However, inverters have limits on how much electrical current and power they can output, and if not controlled properly, they can cause reliability risks for the grid. My work will develop new control strategies to ensure inverters can support the grid effectively without exceeding the current limits...
Toby Chu
Department: Physics Advisor: Matthew Yankowitz I am a 3rd year PhD student in physics working in the Yankowitz Lab. I am interested in the novel phenomena hosted in 2D materials and their heterostructures, and I study these systems from a microscopic point of view using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS). My current research focus is on systems exhibiting spontaneous electron fractionalization and crystallization, including twisted bilayer MoTe2 and rhombohedral few-layer graphene. I believe that the study of fundamental physics will inevitably lead to technological advancements that can benefit the human kind as a whole, as is the case throughout history....
Jane Keth
Department: Chemical Engineering Faculty Advisor: David S. Bergsman The high demand for faster, more computationally powerful computers drives the semiconductor industry to develop new processing chips with greater memory capacity. To address the need for higher-performing electronic devices, research technologies have focused on developing photoresists with a higher density of transistors that can potentially reduce electricity costs, lower carbon emissions, and mitigate the climate crisis. My research focuses on using bottom-up synthesis approaches to discover new ultrathin film photoresists capable of absorbing extreme ultraviolet light to enable next-generation materials....
Anna Okounkova
Department: Physics Adivsor: Matthew Yankowitz My research in condensed matter physics under Prof. Matt Yankowitz is on the electronic transport of 2D materials. During my time under the CEI Fellowship, I will be investigating the properties and applications of rhombohedral pentalayer graphene aligned to hexagonal boron nitride. Combining these structural criteria in one nanoscale device is predicted to lead to remarkable phenomenons observable in graphene, most excitingly fractional Chern insulators (FCI). In FCIs, the fractionalized excitations are conducted by composite fermions, such as anyons. Due to their intrinsic topological properties, these anyons can be non-abelian, which is of significant interest in topological quantum computation. Compared to...
Soren Sandeno
Department: Chemistry Advisor: Prof Brandi Cossairt Research Description: I am a fourth-year in the Cossairt lab working on synthesizing colloidal nanomaterials for use in solid-state lighting and photovoltaic detection. I focus on indium phosphide (InP) and indium arsenide (InAs) quantum dots which provide a heavy metal free platform for generating highly efficient optoelectronic materials that can emit and detect across the visible and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. These materials have metastable molecular intermediates that form during the synthesis that we have been able to isolate and characterize. The metastability of these intermediates may allow for neoteric pathways towards obtaining complex yet highly desirable materials such...
Hareesh Iyer
Department: Materials Science and Engineering Advisor: Eleftheria Roumeli Of the 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic waste generated since the 1950s, less than 10% has been recycled, while almost 80% has accumulated in landfills. These plastics often end up in the environment, causing acute trauma to animals that ingest them, and concentrating organic pollutants that can be harmful to animals and humans alike. My research in Dr. Eletheria Roumeli's lab focuses on the development of plastics that are sustainably sourced and biodegradable. I work with algae and plant biomatter, as well as bacteria and bacterially-produced biomatter, to create materials that are lower in environmental impact over their...
Lucy Miller
Department: Chemistry Faculty Advisor: Matt Golder I am a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemistry, where I am studying polymer chemistry in Professor Matt Golder’s laboratory. My research is focused on the development of more delicately controlled cyclic polymerization processes with the goal of synthesizing cyclic block polymers. Ultimately, these polymers will have applications as polyelectrolytes in lithium-ion batteries and should be more stable and processable than their linear counterparts. Outside of work, I spend a lot of time in the mountains hiking and backpacking, as well as dancing and reading....
Emily Miura-Stempel
Department: Chemistry Faculty Advisor: Brandi Cossairt My research investigates the use of doped zinc oxide nanomaterials as hosts for shallow donor qubits for more sustainable devices in quantum computing. In particular, I am looking at the defect engineering in these zinc oxide nanoparticles and how we can mitigate defects while producing colloidally stable and highly emissive zinc oxide nanorods....
Rishabh Sanghavi
Department: Chemical Engineering Faculty Advisor: Zachary Sherman My research is broadly focused on designing nanoparticle-based materials for optical properties. Nanoparticles are appealing as they can minimize light loss and enhance optical absorption when used in energy applications such as photovoltaic cells. Their smaller size and large specific surface area allow them to enhance energy conversion and storage. We use computational simulations, inverse design, and optimization to achieve a desired optical property and learn about the compositional and positional properties of the material in the process. More specifically, we use a mutual polarization method, to calculate polarization effects from external field. I hope to study electric field incident-angle independent materials...