Two grad students win best poster award at summer internships

This summer, two of MechSE Professor Harley Johnson’s graduate students each won best poster award at their summer internships. Purnima Ghale and Kyle Mackay earned this prestigious award at their end-of-summer symposia. 

 

Ghale spent her summer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she worked on a project involving a quantum mechanical molecular dynamics code that was in development. She was co-recipient of the best poster award for a group poster in the Materials Science division. 

 

Ghale is a PhD candidate in MechSE studying the connection between classical physics and quantum mechanics. She said she is interested in this field because of its importance in the future of materials design. She currently works with The Center for Exascale Simulation of Plasma-Coupled Combustion (XPACC) where she develops models that can be used to study the behavior of electrodes under plasma-assisted combustion. 

 

Mackay is also a PhD candidate in MechSE working in Johnson’s research group and is co-advised by MechSE Professor Jonathan Freund. He works at XPACC where he studies plasma-wall interactions and the effect of those interactions on the degradation of electrodes, dielectric surfaces, and flame chemistry. 

 

Mackay spent his summer as an intern at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he used molecular dynamics simulation of shock propagation in plasma mixtures.

 

“My work over the summer indicated that species separation was occurring at the shock front, with the effects of species separation becoming more pronounced as the mass ratio of species increased,” said Mackay.

 

He won the Outstanding Poster Award in the Weapons and Complex Integration division for his poster titled, “Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Shocks in Plasma Mixtures.” Participants were evaluated on poster content and design and on a five-minute oral presentation by lab researchers in their field.

 

“It was vindicating to see fellow researchers sharing my feelings on the work I was presenting,” Mackay said. “I’d love to perform more research at national laboratories in the future and this experience reaffirmed a position at a national lab as a viable career path.”