The Frank J. Horton Graduate Research Fellowships are awarded to U of R students whose research supports the program at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). Nitish has been working with Hussein and myself on a number of high energy density flow problems, and is PI on a pilot experimental campaign on OMEGA-EP to measure viscosity in fused silica. He also recently published a paper on shock-particle interactions on a stiff-gas method to approximate solid-like resistance of compressible particles, since material strength models are difficult to implement in rad-hydro codes. Well-deserved for Nitish. Congrats!
Category: students
congratulations to our graduating seniors
A fond farewell and best wishes to our seniors, Umar, Savannah, and Charles, as they take on the next stage of their careers! Umar and Charles are heading to gainful employment, at Applied Materials and ASML, respectively. Savannah is headed to Boston, starting a PhD in MechE at Boston University. It certainly hasn’t been easy, with so much of their undergraduate experience marked by COVID, but they persevered. Come back and say hello during Mel Weekend sometime, but also send me a postcard to decorate my bulletin board.
Also, a belated congratulations to alumni Caroline Cardinale ’21 at Caltech, who recently won a prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
If you haven’t noticed, I started a Google Maps over on the People page to keep track of where our alumni go. If you have an update, please message me!
scholarships and fellowships
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Amidst the COVID crisis, we have some good news — Caroline Cardinale ’20, who has been with our lab group for a while, won an Astronaut Scholarship, given to juniors and seniors in STEM who intend to pursue research in higher education. This year, 56 scholarships were awarded nationwide. The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation was founded by the Mercury 7 astronauts, the very first — a wonderful legacy beyond their already historical contributions. Leo Liu ’19, who is starting his second year as a PhD student at University of Virginia with Dan Quinn, won a Link Foundation Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation Ph.D. Fellowship to continue his research on batoid-inspired hydrodynamics. We’re very proud of our current and past students!
comings and goings
Summer brings changes. Congratulations to Deok-Hoon, Jack, and Leo on graduating from our Mechanical Engineering program! Deok-Hoon and Leo will be joining PhD programs at UC-Santa Barbara and University of Virginia in the fall, respectively. We’ll be seeing them at future APS DFD meetings, most likely! Jack is joining the workforce at L3 Harris Technologies.
We’re sad to see them leave the nest, but a hearty welcome to Nitish and Brennen, who successfully completed their first year of graduate school, and sweated through first-year exams. Now they get to dive deep into research… the fun part!
NCUR ’19!
Amro and Deok-Hoon headed off for warmer latitudes these past few days, presenting their poster on wind turbine array optimization at NCUR ’19. They had a great time, and took advantage of a little sightseeing in Atlanta via scooter-share 🙂
Caroline’s NREIP internship
Caroline secured an internship with the Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program (NREIP), a summer internship program that places college students in research positions at Navy labs. Caroline decided to choose a position at NSWC-Indian Head. While she has been working in the Hydro Lab on making small amphibious devices work in both static and dynamic environments, for her summer internship, she will try her hand at computation related to detonation physics.
Amro and Deok-Hoon going to NCUR19
Amro and Deok-Hoon have been working on fabricating a small-scale, collapsible wind turbine, with the aim to optimize an array of them using machine learning. They took the initiative to write an abstract for NCUR2019 (National Conference on Undergraduate Research), which was accepted for a poster presentation (yay!) , so they will be heading to Kennesaw State in April. Sounds warm compared to Rochester!
APS DFD
The Rochester crew went to the annual meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, where Leo made his conference debut with a poster about his research project. Lots of great talks, a new minisymposium session (thanks to Margaret Byron at Penn State), catching up with old friends, and dining — not swimming — with the fishes at the colossal Georgia Aquarium.
SWE Girls’ Workshop
Brennen and Prof Shang volunteered with the UR chapter of SWE for the biennial workshop for K-6 girls in the Rochester area. The theme was Lights! Camera! Action! SWE, as always, did a fantastic job managing this large event. A lot of new little faces, and a lot of familiar fans!
Hajim spotlight
On Amro Bayoumy, who is an undergrad in ME and was a Xerox Fellow this summer. Amro worked really hard, and learned firsthand how wind engineering is not so straightforward — lots of considerations to be made. Great pics in action!