Three selected as Graduate Student Research program recipients

Three graduate students have earned Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Program awards to perform their doctoral dissertation research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The prestigious award helps cover living expenses and travel for 60 students from universities across the nation. Their proposed research projects address scientific challenges central to Office of Science mission areas from nuclear physics to environmental systems and advanced manufacturing.

“The Graduate Student Research program is a unique opportunity for graduate students to complete their Ph.D. training with teams of world-class experts aiming to answer some of the most challenging problems in fundamental science,” said Harriet Kung, acting director of the DOE Office of Science. “Gaining access to cutting-edge tools for scientific discovery at DOE national laboratories will be instrumental in preparing the next generation of scientific leaders.”

Andrew Marino from the Colorado School of Mines, Ricardo Monge Neria from Case Western Reserve University and Anthony Stewart from the University of Washington will arrive at the Lab this summer to start their fellowships.

Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories, SCGSR prepares graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to the DOE mission and secures the national position at the forefront of discovery and innovation.

Andrew Marino

Under the direction of staff scientist Stephan Friedrich, Marino will continue to contribute to a sterile neutrino project with superconducting radiation detectors (nicknamed the “BeEST”), that he started working on while taking classes at Colorado School of Mines.

“I'm super excited to have received the SCGSR award and to have the opportunity to work here to further my thesis research with Stephan,” Marino said. “I've been mostly working with the data taken with our detectors by someone else and am really looking forward to taking some data myself.”

In school, Marino worked with Superconducting Tunnel Junction (STJ) radiation detectors to measure nuclear recoils. While at LLNL, he will work on the method of STJ detector calibration. In the past, the team has used a laser to compare the energy of laser photons (easily measured) to that of the nuclear recoils (much harder).

“However, nobody has confirmed yet that there's no weird offset associated with low-energy events [missing some photons, for instance] or the difference between photons and charged particles [i.e. nuclei],” Marino said. “I'm hoping that I'll get some great data from STJs and confirmation that our calibration methodology is working accurately.”

Friedrich was instrumental in getting Marino to the Lab. “I was very involved in defining the project and his application, because I really wanted Drew to come to LLNL,” he said.

An LLNL, Marino will learn how to operate the specialized superconducting radiation detectors. He will then take this knowledge and operate the same type of detectors — though a newer model — at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State.

“This includes all the little experimental details that can make or break an experiment,” Friedrich said. “Hopefully, there will be another set of high-profile results coming out of that.”

Ricardo Monge Neria

As a physics student specifically studying techniques to optimize chemical separations, Monge Neria will work under the direction of staff scientist Dan Park on rare-earth element (REE) research.

Monge Neria will work with Park’s team to study protein-based approaches for the separation of crucial rare-earth metals, including measurements for an application to remove metals in waste streams.

“I'm pretty excited about being able to work in novel multi-disciplinary research at a national laboratory, as well as getting to spend time in California, which will be my first time visiting,” Monge Neria said.

He is an experimental biophysics Ph.D. candidate on paper, but his work has mostly focused on studying chemical separations through the lens of single-molecule fluorescence microscopy. He studies the materials science aspect of liquid chromatography-based chemical separations, studying different porous and functionalized materials for difficult separations like rare earths and chiral chemicals.

“As a physicist by training, he brings a unique and complementary skill set to our biology-focused team,” Park said. “A central theme of Ricardo’s thesis work has been resolving the molecular behaviors and local physical phenomena in chromatographic processes. This expertise will be extremely valuable in our continued development of a protein-based chromatographic process for REE separation.”

Leveraging Monge Neria’s quantitative expertise, the team hopes to characterize the thermodynamics and kinetics of a few REE binding proteins that the team discovered within the last few months, with the goal of using this information to develop a predictive model for on-column REE extraction performance

“This is a great chance to simultaneously broaden my research skills into more biological and physical chemistry techniques, as well as expand upon my thesis work,” Monge Neria said. “In my mind, I like to view this opportunity as a ’mini post-doc’ experience where I'll get to work more in-depth in a related research topic. And I hope to make new connections with other researchers in the field, as well as experience the unique national laboratory environment as I head into the next steps of my career.”

Anthony Stewart

Forest ecology and soil sciences Ph.D. candidate Anthony Stewart will work under the direction of staff scientist Katerina Georgiou on soil-carbon storage and persistence. Soil organic matter stores more carbon than both the atmosphere and vegetation combined, and soils in the Pacific Northwest — where Stewart conducts fieldwork — are particularly rich in carbon, in part due to the presence of forested wetlands. Importantly, this carbon also can be hundreds to thousands of years old, but it is still uncertain in what forms this soil carbon is stored and how stable it is in hydrologic gradients in these landscapes.

“I’m grateful for the opportunity to work at such a prestigious institution with a great mentor and collaborators toward addressing key soil science challenges,” Stewart said. “I’m hoping to directly assess how long soil carbon persists in the soil samples I collected. Additionally, I’m planning to measure geochemical properties to explore some of the mechanisms of carbon stabilization.”

Stewart’s field of study is soil science; more specifically, soil carbon and how it persists in the soil and is distributed across landscapes.

“We are really excited that Anthony was awarded this fellowship and will join us at the Lab,” Georgiou said. “His SCGSR project will focus on the controls of soil-carbon storage and persistence across a wetland-upland gradient in the Pacific Northwest. It is an ambitious project that will leverage key expertise and facilities at the Lab, and will also complement our research program in the Nuclear and Chemical Science division.”

This year’s 86 awardees were selected from a diverse pool of graduate applicants from institutions around the country. Selection was based on merit peer review by external scientific experts with awarded funds to conduct part of their thesis research at a host DOE laboratory in collaboration with a DOE laboratory scientist.

Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories, SCGSR prepares graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to the DOE mission and secures the national position at the forefront of discovery and innovation.