A total of five students who participated in research at Hope College during the summer of 2012 had their work selected to present at the recent American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting.
Accompanying the students to the meeting in Baltimore, Md. were two Hope College physics faculty who served as mentors for the research being presented and a sabbatical visitor to the Department.
Billed as the largest physics meeting in the world, the APS March Meeting is an annual event. This year, more than 8,500 people attended, and there were more than 750 scheduled sessions between Monday, March 18, and Friday, March 22.
The students participated in the “Future of Physics Days,” a set of events specifically for undergraduates held as a part of the meeting and organized by the APS and the Society of Physics Students. The undergraduate poster session, on Tuesday, March 19, had 346 contributed abstracts listed in the program.
Three of the students are Hope College students, whose research with Hope physics faculty is ongoing, and two are students from other institutions who did research at Hope College during the summer of 2012 as a part of the department of physics’s current National Science Foundation “Research Experiences for Undergraduates” (REU) site grant.
Four students attended and presented their posters: Hope sophomore Michael Bischak, a physics major from Sammamish, Wash.; Hope junior Kyla Koboski, a political science major from Apple Valley, Minn.; Arthur Bowman III of Detroit, who is a senior and physics major at Wayne State University; and Kevin Tkacz of Novelty, Ohio, who is a junior and physics major at Carnegie Mellon University. Hope senior Jonathan Yarranton, a chemistry major from Muskegon, also had a poster in the poster session, but was unable to attend the meeting.
Accompanying the students were Dr. Stephen Remillard, associate professor of physics and chair of the department; Dr. Jennifer Hampton, assistant professor of physics; and Dr. Rachel Reena Philip, who is a United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia (UBCHEA) Fellow and visiting Hope during the spring 2013 semester from Union Christian College in Aluva India, where she is an assistant professor of physics.
Bischak’s poster was “Effect of Carrier Doping on Nonlinearity of High Temperature Superconducting Thin Films.” He conducts his ongoing research with Remillard. Additional co-authors on the poster were Jinu Thomas of Glenview, Ill., who is a senior and aerospace engineering major at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (who did research at Hope during the summer of 2011 as a part of the REU grant), and Philip.
Koboski’s poster was “Characterization of Electrodeposited Nanoporous Ni and NiCu Films.” She conducts her ongoing research with Hampton.
Bowman’s poster was “Modeling Plasma Formation in a Micro-gap at Microwave Frequency.” He conducted his research with Remillard.
Tkacz’s poster was “Characterization of Nickel-Zinc Electrodeposition.” He conducted his research with Hampton.
Yarranton’s poster was “Electrodeposition and Characterization of Nickel, Iron, Copper Thin Films and the Creation of Nanoporous Structures.” He conducts his ongoing research with Hampton.
Abstracts describing the research projects, searchable by last name, are available online at: http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/PersonIndex/2507
More information about the March Meeting is available online at http://www.aps.org/meetings/march/index.cfm, and more about the American Physical Society is available at http://www.aps.org/about/index.cfm