I will graduate with a Bachelor’s of Science in Physics from Oregon State University (OSU) in June of 2017. During my senior year, I was the treasurer of both the OSU Society of Physics Students and the ΣΠΣ honors society. I have conducted research with Dr. Janet Tate on thin-film semiconductors about the thermoelectric properties of novel alloys and their structure, which I probe with Raman spectroscopy. My undergraduate thesis was on the ‘Thermoelectric properties of the heterostructural alloy’. I am a co-author on ‘Structural, electronic, and optical properties of the heterostructural alloy’ which is under review in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

After my SPS internship, I will take a year off from school to work, then plan to enroll in graduate school in the fall of 2018. I plan to study physics education research. I am interested in how people learn physics and what it means to think like a physicist. This was inspired by my work as a learning assistant for the yearlong ‘Paradigms in Physics’ program, which is the junior year physics sequence at OSU.