Visiting undergraduates spend summer in Vanderbilt labs

by David F. Salisbury

"I've become much more confident," said Katherine Camenisch. The sophomore from King College in Bristol, Tenn., was describing her experience this summer working in a physics laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

Photo by Neil Brake
Jerald Kavich from Lewis University in Romeoville, Ill. works with a second harmonic generation turnable laser in the Stevenson Center. Kavich is one of 10 undergraduate physics students who participated in the NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at Vanderbilt this summer.

"They teach you that you can learn anything. They brought me up from a general physics level to the point where I could solve a problem on my own, something that I never dreamed I would be able to do," said the coed, who comes from Ferrum, Va.

Camenisch is one of 10 undergraduate physics majors from colleges ranging from New Hampshire to Texas who spent 10 weeks this summer getting a taste of what scientific research is really like as part of a highly competitive internship program funded by the National Science Foundation. Three of the interns are women and two are Hispanic-American.

The program, called Research Experiences for Undergraduates, was established out of concern that a decreasing number of American students are pursuing careers in research. This su mmer, NSF is investing about $24 million to support 400 REU sites. Each location hosts about 10 undergraduate science and engineering majors who are currently attending colleges without major research programs. The program pays for the students' rooms and includes a stipend that covers food and incidental expenses. The hope is that this experience will encourage the students to choose careers in engineering and science.

"Last year we had eight students participate in a one-year trial," said Royal Albridge, professor of physics, who directs the program. "Last year was very successful, so we have been funded to continue the program for three years."

Camenisch and Eric Chancellor, who is from Louisville, Ky. and attends a small college in New Jersey, worked with the research group of John Wikswo, the A. B. Learned Professor of Living State Physics. There they worked on problems involving the electromagnetic nature of the heart.

Camenisch designed an optics system that allows the researchers to take images that show the changes in voltage and calcium concentration in the heart simultaneously using two fluorescent dyes that glow in different colors. Chancellor worked on the problem of taking detailed measurements of the magnetic field strength at different points in the heart and mathematically converting the information into a map of the electrical current flow.

At the same time, Hugo Valle, who lives in McAllen, Texas, and attends the University of Texas Pan American, and Joseph O'Malley, a South Carolinian who attends Norwich University in Vermont, got a taste of big science. They worked with physics professors Victoria Greene and Charles Maguire, who are collaborators on a major international science program called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (see July 3, 2000 Register). RHIC is a new particle collider located at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. It is designed to create microscopic quantities of a state of matter, called the quark-gluon plasma, thought to have existed in the first few thousandths of a second after the Big Bang.

"Big science is kind of cool," said O'Malley, "but it is different from what I had imagined." It doesn't have the glitz and polish of Hollywood depictions, he and Valle agreed. It is far more gritty and industrial.

Boris Glebov, an Orlando, Fla., resident who was born in Russia and attends the University of Florida, and Jerald J. Kavich of Joliet, Ill., who is enrolled in Lewis University in Romeoville, Ill., spent their summer working in the solid state physics laboratory of physics professor Norman H. Tolk. Glebov helped analyze a new silicon-based material that Tolk's group hopes might be an improvement on the pure silicon used in computer chips. Kavich, who is a repeat from last summer, was put to work studying the optical properties of some of the new materials being developed in the lab.

"It's a very nice environment," Kavich said. "Everyone helps out."

The other summer interns were: Cynthia Heiner from New Rochelle, N.Y., who attends the University of New Hampshire; Matthew McMahon from Bloomfield, Conn., who goes to Drew University in Madison, N.J.; April Teske of Snellville, Ga., who is enrolled at Stetson University in Deland, Fla.; and Ruben Ybarra of Edinburg, Texas, who attends the University of Texas Pan American.