A doctoral candidate in the OSU College of Science has been selected for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research program.

Physics student Izak McGieson is one of 80 honorees nationwide, from 27 states and 53 universities.

The program’s goal is to prepare graduate students for STEM careers deemed critically important to the Office of Science mission by providing graduate thesis research opportunities at Department of Energy laboratories in collaboration with DOE scientists.

Those opportunities advance the students’ thesis work while providing access to the expertise, resources and capabilities at Department of Energy facilities. Students spend between three and 12 months in the program.

McGieson will work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with phase change materials, which have applications in digital memory. McGieson is part of professor Melissa Santala’s lab group at Oregon State.

“At the National Center for Electron Microscopy, a facility at the Berkeley lab, I'll be studying the crystallization – the set operation for a digital bit – of these materials using high-speed transmission electron microscopy imaging with simultaneous calorimetry,” said McGieson, whose work has already taken him to the National Institute of Standards & Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

“The work I'm doing at NIST right now is to fabricate and prepare the devices that go inside the transition electron microscope and enable the simultaneous calorimetry,” he said.

For a complete list of Department of Energy awardees, their institutions and host DOE facility, click here.

May 11, 2022