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A.J. Stewart Smith. Photo credit: Elle StarkmanAward-winning researcher wants to support 'moms in STEM'

Former Stanford University graduate student Ming Yi has been awarded the $60,000 L’Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellowship, which is given to five U.S.-based women each year as part of an effort to raise awareness of women’s contributions to science and identify exceptional female researchers to serve as role models.

Yi, whose graduate research on novel materials included extensive work at the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, said she plans to start a support group for moms in STEM fields – science technology, engineering and mathematics – as an outreach activity under the fellowship.

“Before I had my baby last year, the gender imbalance problem did not have as deep an impression on me. I felt that the opportunities available to guys were also available to me,” she said. “When I had my baby, it really hit me that being a mom is a different lifestyle. I feel that for young mothers in STEM this is a critical time period in our lives when we make decisions about how to further our career paths.”

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Scientists celebrate the arrival of the first neutrino beam at the MicroBooNE detector.Brookhaven hosts one of three new Centers for Computational Materials Sciences

DOE's Brookhaven Lab will host a new center devoted to developing computational tools to advance materials science. With $12 Million in funding from DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences over the next four years, this center will be led by Gabriel Kotliar of Rutgers University and Brookhaven, with additional partners from the University of Tennessee and Ames Laboratory, and make use of computing capabilities at three DOE Office of Science User Facilities—the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the DOE Leadership Computing Facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

The Brookhaven “Center for Computational Design of Functional Strongly Correlated Materials & Theoretical Spectroscopy” is one of three new efforts funded by DOE for computational materials science. The others are the “Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials,” based at Argonne, and the “Computational Synthesis of Materials Software Project with Validation on Layered Low Dimensional Functional Materials and Ultra-Fast X-Ray Laser Experiments,” led by University of Southern California with partners at Berkeley Lab, SLAC, and other institutions.

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See also…

DOE Pulse
  • Number 451  |
  • November 2, 2015
  • Making 3-D objects disappear

    Urban pollutants work together to form the brownish particles seen over major cities the world over. Image reproduced by permission of PNNL and the Royal Society of Chemistry in PCCP 17:23312. Invisibility cloaks are a staple of science fiction and fantasy, from Star Trek to Harry Potter, but don’t exist in real life, or do they? Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have devised an ultra-thin invisibility “skin” cloak that can conform to the shape of an object and conceal it from detection with visible light. Although this cloak is only microscopic in size, the principles behind the technology should enable it to be scaled-up to conceal macroscopic items as well.

    Working with brick-like blocks of gold nanoantennas, the Berkeley researchers fashioned a “skin cloak” barely 80 nanometers in thickness, that was wrapped around a three-dimensional object about the size of a few biological cells and arbitrarily shaped with multiple bumps and dents. The surface of the skin cloak was meta-engineered to reroute reflected light waves so that the object was rendered invisible to optical detection when the cloak is activated.

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  • New equation bolsters multiphase modeling code

    Antimatter will surf on plasma waves in the particle colliders of the future. While designing models for the Multiphase Flow with Interphase Exchanges (MFiX) code, one of the National Energy Technology Laboratory’s most robust computational tools, Physical Research Scientist Jordan Musser realized that an important component of energy system behavior was not accurately accounted for in the existing code. In energy systems, it is common for more than one phase of matter to interact with another, a phenomenon known as multiphase flow. For instance, during combustion and gasification, coal particles interact with gases, creating a gas-solid.

    Within these flows, the constituents may change phases during reactions, releasing heat energy that researchers must carefully account for as they build models to predict how energy systems will behave. More accuracy provides greater confidence in these tools which may be used to reduce scale-up time and decrease capital investments, leading to cheaper, more efficient systems that will be deployed more rapidly.

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  • NREL helps federal agencies reach new efficiency targets

    Redistribution of electronic clouds causes a lattice instability and freezes the flow of heat in highly efficient tin selenide. The crystal lattice adopts a distorted state in which the chemical bonds are stretched into an accordion-like configuration, and makes an excellent thermoelectric because heat propagation is thwarted. When it comes to energy use, what the federal government wants is more of less. That means fewer greenhouse gases, fewer buildings powered solely by electricity generated from fossil fuels, and fewer gas-guzzling fleets on the road.

    An executive order issued by the White House in March puts greater emphasis on work done at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to help government agencies meet their goals. NREL has long been a resource for federal agencies on energy efficiency efforts and renewable energy technology. The newest executive order calls for tougher goals and spurs agencies to do more than what they've done already.

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