Department News - UMD Physics (2024)

Recent Alumnus Embraced Community and Service at UMD

Details: Published: Tuesday, January 31 2023 00:01

Joining a graduate program is not just about choosing a university and studying a subject. It’s also about joining a community of people who help shape the experience and can support and welcome people who are new to the world of academic research.

Andrew Guo (Ph.D. ’22, physics) spent a lot of his time at UMD researching the underpinnings of quantum interactions and algorithms as a graduate student at the Joint Quantum Institute and the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS). During that period he also made time to connect with surrounding communities and to invite other people to participate in physics and astronomy research through the graduate student organization called Graduate Resources for Advancing Diversity with Maryland Astronomy and Physics (GRAD-MAP).

Andrew Guo teaching a lesson as part of the 2018 ASDAN Math Tournament in Beijing, China.Guo credits his choice to study physics to a natural spark of curiosity, along with his childhood enjoyment of math and science.

“Physics in particular inspired me, both because of its elegance and simplicity and its ability to have a huge impact on society,” Guo said. “For me, personal curiosity was a big factor. But also, knowing that there's potential societal impact as a result of research was a key motivating factor.”

Before coming to UMD, Guo studied physics as an undergraduate at Stanford University, where he became particularly intrigued by quantum information and quantum computing.

“I thought UMD was doing great work at that area from sort of the full stack—from experimental trapped ion quantum computing all the way up to the theoretical complexity theory side,” Guo said. “So, I wanted to dive in, and they offered me a fellowship through QuICS, which I've been affiliated with through all my six plus years here. And I think I found a great community there.”

Andrew Guo with three other recipients of QuICS Lanczos Graduate Fellowships. From left to right: Aniruddha Bapat, Minh Tran, Andrew Guo, and Eddie Schoute. Image credit: Arushi Bodas

After Guo decided to come to UMD, he hadn’t settled on exactly what aspects of quantum research to focus on, and there were several professors he was open to working with. Alexey Gorshkov, an adjunct associate professor of physics at UMD, approached him about research into long-range interacting systems. This research looked at how interactions between quantum particles that aren’t immediate neighbors influence the spread of the property called quantum entanglement and can speed up quantum computations.

“I was excited that I was able to get such an outstanding student,” Gorshkov said. “It was fantastic, from both the research aspect and the mentoring service aspect. He did well in both, wrote excellent papers, and also was very helpful to other people in the group.”

Pursuing the line of research, Guo and his colleagues were able to make several advances, including identifying how speed limits for quantum information can depend on the particular task and making a protocol that achieves the theoretical speed limit for certain tasks.

“I found it very, very helpful to have close collaborators—people to talk to who can help you when you're stuck, who can bounce ideas off each other,” Guo said. “It was a pleasant surprise to find that the collaborative environment at Maryland was such an integral part of grad school.”

While beginning graduate research, Guo also wanted to do community outreach. Guo learned about GRAD-MAP during his first year at UMD, when one of the organization’s leaders gave a presentation to the physics graduate students. GRAD-MAP is dedicated to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in the fields of physics and astronomy. The organization strongly focuses on reaching out to students with backgrounds that are underrepresented in physics and astronomy and bringing them to UMD to share valuable experiences in the field.

“We are grad students working to promote inclusive environments for fellow grad students, as well as increase the proportion of students who come from underrepresented minority backgrounds,” Guo said.

GRAD-MAP organizes programs to give undergraduate students insight into the world of physics and astronomy research and help them develop useful skills. The organization runs a weeklong Winter Workshop where undergraduates tour scientific facilities, perform mini-research projects and develop skills, such as writing application essays and computer programing. GRAD-MAP also organizes a 10-weeks-long Summer Scholars Program where undergraduate students can build on the Winter Workshop skills with a full research project under the supervision of a mentor. GRAD-MAP has worked with students from nearby institutions like Prince George’s Community College, Montgomery College and Howard University, as well as students from across the U.S. and outside the country.

Guo’s first January at UMD, he taught the programming language Python at the Winter Workshop. He said he was inspired by the students and kept teaching programing as part of GRAD-MAP. He eventually worked his way up to leading the entire Python portion of the workshop.

“For these students to learn programming, I think is pretty significant because it gives them a playground to test their ideas,” Guo said. “And it's very good practical training for them, regardless of what career they pursue in the future, be it physics or astronomy grad school or even a career as a software engineer.”

In the fall of 2019, he became the physics co-lead of GRAD-MAP. Then, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, he had to pivot the program. The GRAD-MAP graduate students transitioned their outreach events online for their 2020 and 2021 Winter Workshops and 2020 Summer Scholars Program.

“A lot of credit goes to my fellow graduate colleagues who really stepped up,” Guo said. “The biggest challenge was to replicate that sense of community online, without leading to basically Zoom fatigue and burnout among the students. I think the students really were the ones who put in the most heroic effort—just going through enduring and then sticking with us as we performed this huge experiment that everybody was doing at that time.”

Andrew Guo and his co-leads Milena Crnogorčević and Charlotte Ward on a video chat with five participants of the 2021 Summer Scholars Program.Despite the additional stress, Guo fondly recalled a GRAD-MAP video chat event where the Winter Workshop participants could show off talents, like playing an instrument, or share other things they cared about, like a participant discussing their plant terrarium. Guo said seeing both the engagement and lasting impact on the students from the program was very fulfilling.

During his time at UMD, Guo also joined communities outside of GRAD-MAP and his lab group. Throughout his time at UMD he lived with other physicists.

“It was definitely a uniquely collaborative, uniquely enriching experience for me,” Guo said. “Throughout COVID not being able to see your coworkers in person made this all the more valuable because you could have informal conversations.”

He also played the cello as a member of the UMD Repertoire Orchestra (now rebranded as the University Orchestra), which is open to members of the campus community, including students from non-music degree programs. He said participating in that creative expression was a nice pressure valve.

Next, Guo will be joint a new community at Sandia National Laboratories as a postdoctoral researcher and said he hopes to participate in outreach efforts there.

Story by Bailey Bedford

From Physics to Pharma

Details: Published: Tuesday, January 31 2023 00:01

Sylvie Ryckebusch (B.S. ’87, physics; B.S. ’87, mathematics) has never underestimated the value—or the challenges—of earning a physics degree.

“I think physics is the hardest subject really,” she explained. “It trains your problem-solving skills, the way you think and learning to work on difficult things. When you’ve spent years studying physics, I think it trains you well for many other lines of work.”Sylvie Ryckebusch

Ryckebusch applied these skills on a rewarding academic and professional path that took her from the research lab to the business world, and from the U.S. to Europe and beyond. Over the past 20 years, she built an impressive track record leading business development for biotech and pharmaceutical companies, negotiating complex research collaborations and licensing transactions, and specializing in everything from partnerships and corporate strategy to helping bring new therapeutics to market.

Today, as chief business officer at BioInvent International in Lund, Sweden, Ryckebusch supports the company’s efforts to develop new antibody drugs for the treatment of cancer. And though she didn’t exactly plan it this way, she’s exactly where she wants to be.

“People always ask me, ‘How did you organize your career to end up in business development?’ because that’s a place where a lot of people want to be—in the pharma industry, and most particularly, in business development” she said. “Honestly it was mostly happenstance. One thing led to another and another and I ended up here, although what was important in making these career choices was the self-awareness along the way about what kind of work and environment I enjoyed.”

European roots and a strong work ethic

Growing up in Howard County, Maryland, Ryckebusch always felt a strong connection to her European roots. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. from France before she was born.

“My mother was a secretary at the World Bank and my father was a chef,” she explained. “He grew up during the war in very difficult times in northern France and had to be pulled out of school early to help support the family, so he became an apprentice in a restaurant. When I was growing up, he was working around the Washington area as a chef and had his own restaurant for a time in Ellicott City.”

With many of her relatives still living in France, Ryckebusch decided to spend her high school years there. Fluent in French, she was interested in many subjects, but her teachers pushed her to pursue her strengths in mathematics.

“If you’re good at science, people aren’t going to tell you that you should study English literature,” Ryckebusch said. “I was always good at math and science and in the schools in France, if you’re good in math they tell you that’s what you’ve got to do, they push you.”

Ryckebusch returned to the U.S. after high school and began college at the University of Maryland in 1983, taking on the challenges of a double degree in mathematics and physics. Raised with a strong work ethic, she was driven to keep doing more.

“I made it really hard for myself,” she admitted. “I skipped the first-year courses, which I probably shouldn’t have done and I did a double-degree program, which would have been a five-year program, but I did it in four years. So, what I remember most from my UMD time is working really hard.”

In those intense academic years, Ryckebusch spent her summers working with a low-temperature physics group at Bell Labs. After graduating from UMD in 1987, she moved on to a Ph.D. program in computation and neural systems at Caltech.

“My focus was understanding the control of locomotion by the neural system,” she explained. “I was, on the one side, building integrated circuits, transistors and capacitors, the circuits that modeled certain behaviors of neurons in the brain, and in parallel, I was doing actual experiments to identify neuronal circuits involved in locomotor functions.”

After earning her Ph.D. in 1994, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Brandeis University, Ryckebusch was ready for something new.

“I had to weigh doing academic science for a career or at least the next six or seven years or starting something different, and I thought, I want a change,” she explained. “I like variety and I wanted to be in the real world, though I wasn’t really sure what the real world was.”

Encouraged by a friend, Ryckebusch joined the Harvard Business School as a postdoctoral researcher. There, she investigated business operations, developing case studies on companies all over the world, some of which are still taught at HBS today.

“I went to Japan, to Israel, all over the place, exploring particular issues related to businesses and the organization of their work and writing these up in case studies,” she recalled. “It was different and it was fun, and I fell into it very easily.”

From case studies to consulting

In 1996, Ryckebusch’s academic background, business research at Harvard and fluency in French helped her land a management consulting position at the Paris office of global consultants McKinsey & Company. The experience helped strengthen her skill set in corporate strategy and business development, but after four years, she realized she missed working with scientists and the intricacies of scientific problem-solving.

“I thought this has been fun and I learned so much, but it was very hard work and not really who I was” Ryckebusch explained. “I wanted to get back into a career closer to science.”

Hoping to apply her experience in both science and business, Ryckebusch joined Serono, a large Geneva, Switzerland-based biotech firm. She quickly realized it was the right place at the right time.

“I ended up in the very best possible place for me and I loved it,” she recalled. “You’re negotiating partnerships and alliances—pharma-pharma, pharma-biotech, biotech-academia alliances—and you have to have a good grasp of the science because you’re working on drug development. It was a business role that I’m still doing today over 20 years later.”

Pharmaceutical giant Merck eventually acquired Serono and shut down its Geneva office, but by then Ryckebusch had three kids in school and didn’t want to uproot her family. So, in 2012, she started her own consulting business. Based in Geneva, she worked with pharma and biotech clients, even finding time to teach a graduate-level pharmaceutical business development course at the Grenoble Ecole de Management.

Then in early 2020, one of Ryckebusch’s clients, BioInvent, suggested that she join them full time as chief business officer.

“BioInvent is a super company, with very high quality science and promising therapeutic drug candidates. I was doing more and more work with them, and they said, ‘Why don’t you join us,’ and it just made sense,” Ryckebusch recalled. “So that’s what I’m doing now.”

Part of a bigger mission

As BioInvent’s chief business officer, Ryckebusch works remotely from her home in Geneva, leading business development efforts, building partnerships and research collaborations for drug development, as well as supporting the investor-backed company with financing and company strategy.

“It costs $800 or $900 million to develop a pharmaceutical product, so biotechs almost never take them to market on their own, you have to partner with a big pharma at some point,” she explained. “There’s a whole strategy around how you partner, when you partner and with whom.”

Ryckebusch takes pride in her role as part of BioInvent’s scientific work in cancer therapeutics. But she’s quick to note that she’s just one small part of a much bigger mission.

“I enjoy that feeling of collectively bringing something forward—we’re all cogs in a wheel,” she explained. “In the pharma industry, it takes 15 to 20 years to develop a drug and a lot of people like me contribute along the way.”

For Ryckebusch, making that kind of contribution means everything.

“It’s all about finding great drugs and developing them and pushing the frontiers of the science,” she reflected. “I really hope one of BioInvent’s products makes it to the market. I would be proud to be able to say a little bit of that came from me.”

Rehearsals, Recitals and Research

Details: Published: Tuesday, January 31 2023 00:01

University of Maryland physics and astronomy dual-degree senior Delina Levine got her first introduction to music when she just was six years old, soon after she pestered her parents to sign her up for piano lessons.Delina Levine

As her fingers rhythmically tapped the black and white keys, Levine noticed that the sounds she created with the piano differed depending on the amount of force her hands exerted on the keys. Applying the piano’s pedals while she played created variations in the sounds she produced and while some chords harmonized, others didn’t. It wasn’t until years later that she learned why and how these changes influenced the music she played.

In middle school, her teacher asked the students to write a paper on any topic, so long as that topic tied back to math. Although Levine was skeptical, her teacher assured her that there was a mathematical connection to almost anything she could think of.

“Of course, I chose to write about music for that assignment,” Levine recalled. “I wasn’t sure at first, but when I researched for the paper, I got to learn about the relationship between math, physics and music. What really struck me was how physics is so involved in music, especially with concepts like acoustics. It was then that I realized how important physics is when it comes to understanding how things work.”

After that assignment, Levine believed physics could be the key to satisfying her natural inquisitiveness about music, stars and outer space. At UMD, Levine’s trifecta of interests prompted her to pursue a dual degree in astronomy and physics in addition to a minor in music performance.

“My first year here, I attended a class taught by Professor Bhatti that talked about the detection and analysis of dark matter. I remember that the class made a big impression on me,” Levine explained. “That was a big step for me into the overlap between physics and astronomy.”

Levine also participated in the 2020 Student Summer Theoretical Physics Research Session (SSTPRS), a program developed by Distinguished University Professor of Physics S. James Gates Jr. Designed to introduce undergraduates to the world of experimental physics research, SSTPRS provided Levine’s first opportunity to see real-world applications for the science she learned in the classroom.

“We spent the first few weeks learning the math and physics needed for the calculations we needed to make later in the program,” said Levine. “That summer, I worked on supersymmetry projects with a group of other undergrads like me, and it gave me critical insight into research and all of the collaborative effort behind it.”

According to Levine, UMD’s Society of Physics Students (SPS) has also been one of the most instrumental parts of her journey to becoming a full-fledged researcher. As a member since 2019, Levine participated in exclusive behind-the-scenes lab tours led by professors and industry physicists, professional development workshops and training sessions, field trips to the campus nuclear reactor and movie nights. In her sophom*ore year, Levine served as SPS board communications officer. By fall 2022, she was elected president—taking a leadership role in the organization that guided her since the beginning of her journey in physics.

“All the camaraderie and knowledge-sharing that I experienced with SPS inspired me to get more involved with its activities and leadership,” Levine said. “I just wanted to continue that tradition and remind my peers that we’re all in this together.”

"As SPS president, Delina is an inspiringleader,” said Donna Hammer, SPS faculty advisor and director of education for UMD’s Department of Physics. “Hervision for SPS includes providing the opportunity for every physics major to feel included, informed and supported.”

Off-campus, Levine puts the skills she developed at UMD into practice. She currently works as an undergraduate research assistant at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), where she studies gamma-ray bursts. Since she started her remote position with NAOJ in 2021, Levine has already written ongamma rays, their luminosity and their potential to be used as a way to measure cosmological distances.

“Although my work at NAOJ is done online, the research environment I’m part of is incredibly diverse. My colleagues are from different time zones and countries all over the world—Italy, India, Japan, just to name a few. I also have a female principal investigator, which is still a rare occurrence in the world of physics and astronomy,” Levine said. “I see her as a role model and mentor, and I’d like to become someone like that in the future for other young scientists. What I’ve learned from NAOJ and also UMD makes me feel better equipped to tackle future challenges and goals that may come to me as a researcher."

Despite her busy schedule, Levine continues to make time for music. Over the years, she accompanied choirs and played with jazz bands, which she says helped her explore her talents beyond her classical training and develop additional layers of flexibility. In May 2022, Levine performed a piano recital at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center to an audience full of her peers, something she hopes to do again before she graduates in May 2023.

“Having these experiences with SPS, my music and my research is very fulfilling for me. I especially appreciate the collaborativeness, creativity and diversity of thought that all these parts of my life encourage,” Levine said. “As president of SPS, I really want to continue supporting my fellow physics students with more opportunities to support and learn from each other—just as SPS and my mentors have done for me.”

Calling All Experimentalists, Designers, Fixers and Tinkerers

Details: Published: Thursday, January 26 2023 00:01

Two of the best-kept secrets in the University of Maryland’s Department of Physics are its Vortex Makerspace and a small class held in the makerspace that is dedicated to the practical skills needed for physics experimentation.

Since 2019, Professor Daniel Lathrop has taught a unique 400-level laboratory course in the Vortex Makerspace (formerly the Physics Welding Shop), which is tucked behind the John S. Toll Physics Building. Designed to teach students hands-on ways to bring their ideas to life, the class touches on topics such as carpentry, circuitry and 3D printing. Lathrop guides the students as they design, plan, build and demo their creations inspired by the semester’s physics lecture topics. But it’s not all about a student’s ability to build from scratch, Lathrop said.

“One thing I really wanted to accomplish with this class was to expose students to skills that they wouldn’t usually come across in their conventional classroom studies,” Lathrop explained. “That not only includes how to make things with their hands but also how to develop soft skills like leadership, budgeting, communication and teamwork—all qualities that are needed in real-life careers in physics.”

To simulate the kinds of situations, goals and challenges that physics experimentalists often encounter, Lathrop wove together 12 weeks of interactive lectures, field trips, training sessions and demonstrations. As his unique lesson plans for the class quickly spread by word of mouth, physics majors eager for a more hands-on learning experience registered for the class.

One of those students, Alexandra Pick-Aluas (B.S. ’22, physics), first heard glowing reviews about Lathrop’s class from two friends and was intrigued by the prospect of a lab elective that could give her a sneak peek into the professional future she hoped to pursue. She realized quickly that the class was unlike any she’d ever taken.

“We were given an introduction to welding, which was obviously something I never tried before,” Pick-Aluas explained. “I learned how to weld pieces of metal together and got to see the difference in outcomes for the different metals I used. For example, aluminum is really easy to melt and that’s one reason why it’s a notoriously difficult metal to weld. It’s one thing to read about it, but it’s a much more enlightening experience to actually see it in action in front of me.”PHYS 499X students demonstrate their Spring 2022 semester project, a liquid nitrogen-cooled superconducting loop. From left to right: Peiyu Qin, Alexandra Pick-Aluas, Meyer Taffel, Noah Doney, Ankith Rajashekar, Brian Robbins, and Dylan Christopherson. Image courtesy of Daniel Lathrop.

Welding was just one skill Pick-Aluas developed during the class. For their final project, Pick-Aluas and her group members built a superconducting loop—an infinitely flowing electric current with no power source—with materials like scrap metal, a bicycle wheel spoke and superconducting tape. Guided by Lathrop, they designed a suitable prototype within a limited budget, ordered their required materials from specialized vendors, constructed their design and wrote a manual explaining how their project functioned.

“Even though our project didn’t exactly work the way we originally wanted it to, the entire process it took to make the superconducting loop is something I’ll always remember,” Pick-Aluas said. “Professor Lathrop says that in reality, failures and setbacks should be expected before making progress.”

She hopes that more physics majors take PHYS 499X before they graduate. For Pick-Aluas, who is now assisting Lathrop in his lab as she prepares for graduate school, the expertise she gained from the course helped shape her own career goals.

“At first, I was a little intimidated, but the class made me feel a lot more comfortable with these skills. Potentially applying them on the job is a little less daunting to me now,” Pick-Alaus explained. “PHYS 499X is a really good overview of what you can expect in a real-life physics-related profession, whether it’s in academia or in industry.”

Beyond the class, physics majors can also use the Vortex Makerspace—which is housed within the same single-room building as PHYS 499X—for all their experimentalist aspirations. Thanks to key efforts from UMD Physics Director of Education Donna Hammer, Vortex provides a dedicated time and place for students to work on meaningful projects of their own. Equipped with saws, welders, wires, wrenches and other knickknacks ready for students to use, the makerspace also encourages students to walk in and chat with Vortex’s ‘shop managers’ if they need additional guidance, resources or someone to simply bounce ideas off of.

“We’re open four afternoons a week to anyone during the semester—no experience or background necessary,” said Jake Lyon, a senior physics major and vice president of the Vortex Makerspace. “Vortex frequently holds training sessions and workshops for a variety of topics, like intro into basic coding or circuitry.”

Jake Lyon (right) teaches a student how to solder a simple circuit at the UMD Physics Vortex Makerspace.Lyon became involved with the makerspace as a sophom*ore. Over the next few years, he attended a variety of training sessions and eventually developed an arsenal of handy skills from 3D printing to soldering. Then he tested this newly acquired knowledge, applying it to the projects he took on at the makerspace, including his personal favorite, fixing a broken megaphone. He believes taking the megaphone apart, figuring out how it worked and diagnosing what went wrong was an experience that will stay with him long after he graduates.

“The Vortex is a fantastic place to learn and get comfortable with the basic parts of fabrication with the right equipment while also getting to know the physics makers community,” Lyon said. “We facilitate learning but try to encourage teamwork and communication with everyone as well.”

In addition to the activities held during the semester, the Vortex Makerspace also offers a series of summer programs, including the Physics Makers Camp for high school students looking to get a head start on creative thinking and design, run by Outreach Coordinator Angel Torres. And although Vortex is run by physics undergraduates, Lyon said the organization welcomes anyone who wants to bring a project to life.

“We have a good lineup of ideas for workshops in the spring semester, so anyone—including non-physics majors—looking to acquire a new handy skill or two is welcome to stop by,” Lyon said. “Just bring an idea and we’ll bring the tools.”

Written by Georgia Jiang

Taking the SMART Path

Details: Published: Thursday, January 26 2023 00:01

In 2021, when Isabelle Brooks left her home in Minnesota to study physics at the University of Maryland, she knew it would mean a big transition—from an all-girls high school with fewer than 500 students to a huge college campus with more than 40,000 students. It turned out to be even more exciting than she expected.

“It was definitelya culture shock,” Brooks recalled. “I told my roommate it was crazy to me that I kept seeing so many facesI didn’t recognize. I was around so many different people doing so many differIsabelle Brooksent things—it was a really cool and exciting experience.”

Brooks’ experiences have exceeded her expectations in more ways than one, and although she’s only a sophom*ore she’s already charting her path toward a career in physics. One big boost in that direction came last year when she was awarded a Department of Defense SMART (Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation) Scholarship.

SMART Scholars receive full tuition for up to five years and hands-on internship experience working directly with an experienced mentor at one of over 200 innovative laboratories across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Department of Defense, plus a stipend and full-time employment with the Department of Defense after graduation.

This summer, Brooks will intern at a U.S. Army facility in Maryland.

“I’ll be working at Aberdeen Proving Ground with the Department of Defense,” Brooks said. “The lab I’ll be working with focuses on satellite communications and other innovative technologies for our armed forces. It’s super exciting.”

Physics in the family

Always a strong student, Brooks got an early introduction to physics thanks to her father who studied physics when he was in college.

“My dad was my biggest influence,” she explained. “He’s a patent attorney now and he works with a lot of science and technology, which has been super cool to watch as I’ve been growing up.”

Despite her interest in her dad’s work, Brooks wasn’t initially drawn to physics herself.

“My dad was always like, ‘It’s really important to study science,’ but I didn’t really want to,” Brooks recalled. “My freshman year in high school I actually did not do well in my introductory physics class at all, I didn’t like the content and I told my dad, ‘I’m never doing this.’”

All it took was one class to change her mind.

“In my senior year I ended up taking honors physics and I had the best, most supportive most influential professor who helped me understand that I am really good at this and there is an opportunity for me to do much more with it,” she said. “After that, it really made sense to me—I liked seeing how physics is playing out in the real world, and I knew this was something I wanted to do.”

So many possibilities

In the summer after Brooks’ first year at UMD, one of her relatives who works with the Defense Department encouraged her to apply for the SMART Scholarship to help her achieve her dream of a degree in physics. Months later she got the news she was hoping for.

“I was checking my inbox every day and when I saw the email I was shaking because I knew this had to be it,” she recalled. “When I opened the email and got the good news that I’d received the scholarship I just felt so honored. There are just so many possibilities that can come from this.”

Since then, regular check-in meetings with her SMART mentor James Mink, Chief of the Tactical Systems Branch (SATCOM) have helped Brooks learn more about the opportunities ahead and prepare for her summer internships. This summer—and every summer until she graduates—she’ll work directly with her mentor at the U.S. Army DEVCOM C5ISR Center - Aberdeen Proving Ground, gaining valuable hands-on experience and training that will prepare her for a full-time position there after graduation.

Brooks credits her participation in the FIRE (First-Year Innovation and Research Experience) program and her work with the Simulating Particle Detection research group for helping her build a strong foundation for her research, which has also focused on the challenges of quantum Fourier transforms—mathematical models that help to transform the signals between two different domains.

She’s gained more confidence in herself and her abilities every step of the way.

“My parents always raised me to believe I could do anything I put my mind to, overcome any obstacle, but I think coming to such a big school, at first I wasn’t sure if I could really do this,” she recalled. “But now I just feel like I’ve opened up so much more confidence in myself and an awareness of my ability and my strength as a student, and that feels really good.”

Brooks continues to explore her fascination with physics in exciting and unexpected ways, thanks to professors who challenge and inspire her. Her favorite class this year was PHYS 235: The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

“It’s taught by Professor Sylvester Gates, who I think is the coolest person ever,” Brooks said. “I was so excited when I was in that class, but it was definitely hard. If I wasn’t a physics major, I think I’d be crying with the problem sets we had and the material we worked on, but that class and a lot of my physics classes have pushed me to think in new ways.”

It's been less than two years since Brooks came to UMD from a small Minnesota high school, but now as she pursues her passion for physics and looks ahead to the opportunities that will come with her SMART Scholarship, she’s thinking big.

“I just have this feeling that I can do a lot more with my life and my education than I ever grasped,” she explained. “I think with this Defense Department scholarship I’ll most likely pivot towards applied research and satellite communication technology, and knowing that the work I’ll be doing will actually support people who fight for our country is incredibly amazing. I can’t wait to make a difference.”

Written by Leslie Miller