Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Stories

REUs typically occur in the summer, last anywhere from six to ten weeks, and come with a $3,000 to $5,000 stipend plus room and board.  APSU students have fared exceptionally well in being selected for these highly competitive slots, a testimony to the exceptionally high quality educational background that our students receive.   

2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003

Fall 2007

Betsy Hall participated in NASA's USRP at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory .  where she worked characterizing infrared detectors that will be implemented into NASA's latest infrared space telescope: WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer). WISE is scheduled to launch in 2008 and will survey the entire sky in the mid-infrared with sensitivity that has never been achieved before at such wavelengths.

Summer 2007

Josh Henry attended Brookhaven National Laboratory’s prestigious American Chemical Society Nuclear Chemistry Summer School in Upton, N.Y. This educational program emphasizes nuclear medicine, nuclear power, fundamental particle physics and environmental radiochemistry.  Josh is the fourth APSU physics major in as many summers to be selected for this prestigious program.

Bryan Gaither attended NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center for the third consecutive summer, the last time as a team lead for Goddard’s Robotics Academy.  Gaither and his team continued their work on the modeling of tetrahedral-based robotics structures as part of the Tetrahedral Walker Project. "The development is important in the field of space robotics," Gaither said.

Betsy Hall participated in the REU program at the University of Central Florida in their College of Optics and Photonics. She researched the nonlinear characteristics of a neat solution of carbon disulfide. Ultra-short pulsed picosecond and femtosecond lasers were used at various wavelengths to determine the efficiency of carbon disulfide as a calibration model for the well-know Z-scan technique.

Jimmy McKee participated in Fisk University's REU program. He was in the Materials Science and Applications group doing research in biophotonics. He used photoluminescence to determine the concentration of zinc in CZT crystals provided by NASA. Jimmy also used Raman spectroscopy to determine the composition of three major plastics.

Melissa Butner travelled to Tucson, Arizona where she worked with Dr. Matt Penn, the telescope scientist for the McMath/Pierce Solar telescope on Kitt Peak, at the National Solar Observatory (NSO).  While in Tucson, Melissa had the opportunity to visit the NSO telescopes (one of the premier solar observatories in the world) and the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, and participate in nighttime observing at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory located on Kitt Peak.  Her research project involved mapping the outflow velocity in sunspot penumbras studying at the amplitude and the position angles of the flow, the Evershed effect.  This was the first comprehensive study of this effect over most of a solar cycle, using data collected over the past 11 years. 

Michael Northington participatee in Fisk University's REU program. Michael worked in material physics with an emphasis in nanomaterials. He worked with the material science department trying to produce a random laser in heat treated glass ceramics. He used raman spectroscopy to test different materials' lasing properties.

Patrick Wilkerson participated in the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Patrick conducted research on the development of new computational methods and numerical analysis. He was responsible for the implementation, debugging, and testing of a program intended to solve finite-difference equations using sparse linear algebra on multiple processors, up to 64. The title of his summer research paper is "A Case Study of the Speculative Asynchronous Simulation on Parallel Computers." Applications of the techniques include efficient molecular dynamics and large-scale parallel numerical methods.

Adrian Parker performed research prior to starting his M.S. degree in physics at Fisk. Adrian worked in material physics with an emphasis in nanomaterials.

J. P. Badasci worked at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' High Pressure Science and Engineering Center studying material behavior at very high pressures.

Angela Mason studied Nanoscale Structure and Shaping of Ferroelectric Domains at Lehigh University's Center for Optical Technologies.  During the ten week program Angela spent two weeks studying at the Universities of Bonn and Paderborn in Germany.

Jessica Travierso participated in the Research Alliance in Math and Science (RAMS) program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).  Jessica helped to port, optimize, and test parallel physics simulations to the NSF TeraGrid Computers. Click here to learn more about Jessica's summer research experience.

Bill Talkington was invited back to the American Chemical Society's Prestigous Nuclear Chemistry Summer School in San Jose State University as a teaching assistant.