Students shine at summer poster symposium

Students from all over the world flock to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) each summer for the opportunity to engage in work-study employment opportunities in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and administrative fields as part of the summer internship program.

LLNL was proud to welcome more than 600 students this year.

At the end of the summer, the Laboratory’s Strategic Human Resources Management (SHRM) department and the Institutional Education Committee sponsor a student poster symposium as a forum for students to showcase their summer research projects and communicate their work with others. To help them prepare, two workshops were offered, providing guidelines and instruction on creating eye-catching posters.

More than 250 students and faculty participated in the 2015 Student Poster Symposium last week, making this year’s symposium the largest to date.

Organizer Susan Lowder of SHRM was thrilled with the number of those participating. "This was the largest group ever. We may need to add a third session in the future to accommodate all interested participants," she said. "This was a great experience for all involved. The evaluators indicated how impressed they were with the caliber of the projects, and the students expressed having a very positive summer experience, which is always great to hear."

The posters on display showcased world-class scientific and technical research and collaborations between students and their LLNL mentors. More than 80 employees, representing each directorate, volunteered as evaluators.

The morning session featured Engineering, Physical and Life Sciences and Weapons & Complex Integration. Computation, Director’s Office, Global Security and NIF & Photon Science were showcased in the afternoon.

The students were enthusiastic to share highlights of their research with employees and evaluators. Evaluators were impressed with how students approached the crowd and how engaging they were. Twenty-eight projects were singled out for awards. The number of selected winners was based on the number of participants in each principal directorate. Organizations with a larger number of participants had more winners than those with fewer participants.

The following special recognition awards were given:

     Computation

• Luz Angelica Caudillo Mata, "Numerical Upscaling of Maxwell’s Equations"
• Konstantinos Chasapis, "Toward Scientific-Data Compression Using Variable Clustering"
• Alyson Fox, "Exploring LAMG: An Investigation of More Robust Techniques"
• Tyler Jackson, "Form Management System"
• Aaditya Landge, "In-Situ Feature Extraction of Scientific Simulations"
• Dayanara Lebron Aldea, "Microbial Community Profiling of an Unexpected Source: Our Personal Genome"
• Manuel Quezada de Luna, "Non-Oscillatory Flux Corrected Transport for High-Order Finite Discretizations"

Director’s Office

• Jasmine Fox, "Light-Dependent Extracellular Enzyme Activities in Simplified Microbial Mats"
• Nicholas Goucher, "Resolving O-Like Fe XIX X-Ray Emission Using Electron Beam Ion Trap With a Beryl-Crystal Bragg Spectrometer"

Engineering

• Lane Carasik, "Simulations of Boron Mixing Within a Nuclear Reactor Vessel and the Effect of Fibrous Debris Accumulation"
• Daniel Driver, "DEM Powder Scale Simulations of Additive Manufacturing"
• Bradley Petkus, "Material Characterization and Optimization for the iCHIP"
• Carl Stringer, "Fabrication and Assembly of High Spatial Resolution Neurostimulating Electrodes"

Global Security

• Youngwook Kwon, "Image Registration for Weakly Consistent Appearance Input"

Physical and Life Sciences

• Ashley Allen, "Transparent Ceramic Scintillators: Gelcasting Garnets"
• Carlos Borca Paredes, "Developing Materials-Modeling Software for Electron Dynamics With Van der Waals Interactions"
• Juan Jose Diaz Leon, "Broadband, Wide Angle Antireflection Coatings"
• Allister Frazer, "Pulsed X-Ray Source Development at National Security Technologies"
• Andrew Goldschmidt, "Initial State Physics in Droplets of Quark-Gluon Plasma From Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions"
• Yasmeen Haider, "Whole Proteome Profiling of Burkholderia Using Bioorthogonal Noncanonical Amino Acid Tagging (BONCAT)
• Sookyung Kim, "Magnetic Anisotropy of CoPt"
• Colin Thomas, "Optimization of Operating Parameters for Resonance Ionization Mass Spectrometry"

NIF & Photon Science

• Jeremy Hassett, "Improving Performance of X-Ray Streak Camera Diagnostics"
• Doniko Kingi, "Ice Templating Synthesis of Low-Density Nanoporous Silver Foams"
• Owen Mannion, "Simulating Neutron Time of Flight Data"

Weapons Complex Integration

• Carly Arthur, "Dynamic Fracture and Failure Modeling of Explosively Loaded Materials"
• Kyle Mackay, "Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Shocks in Plasma Mixtures"
• Cheuk Lau, "LDFE Quadrature Sets and Consistent Angular Derivative Discretization for RZ SN Transport"

With students now departing the Laboratory and heading back to their respective schools or on to new opportunities, everyone agreed the Student Poster Symposium was a great way to end the summer.

To learn more about summer internships and the Laboratory’s scholar programs, visit the scholars@llnl website.

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