2010 Student Rresearch

Maria Battaglia - Maria's a sophomore Leadership in Medicine student who is working with me on an elemental composition & concentration of liquid precipitation around New York State. We've performed a PIXE analysis of rainwater and snow data collected from Clifton Park, Hadley, Corinth, Schenectady, Cold Spring Harbor, and Oyster Bay, NY using the 1.0 MV tandem electrostatic Pelletron particle accelerator. Maria will be presenting her results at several venues throughout the year. The first will be the April 2010 meeting of the New York State Section of the American Physical Society, follwed by the Union College Steinmetz Symposium, in May, and at the 21st international Conference on the Applications of Accelerators in Research and Industry (CAARI-2010) held in Fort Worth, Texas in August. Here is a picture of Maria at the conference below and here's a link to Maria's poster.

Brandon Bartell - Brandon's project over the summer was designed to introduce him to how a tandem electrostatic particle accelerator works as well as train him to be an operator on the accelerator. In addition, Brandon's computer programming skills proved to be invaluable. The accelerator lab recently purchased a new software analysis package, called GUPIXWIN. This analysis package had to be able to open and display our PIXE spectrum files taken from our accelerator's data acquisition system. GUPIXWIN has its own file format structure that did not match our spectrum files. Brandon wrote the necessary code in VPython to convert our data acquisition files to GUPIXWIN's format, no easy task, but he accomplished it with ease.

Colin Gleason - Colin is a rising junior Physics major working with Prof. Mike Vineyard on the elemental analysis of aerosol samples from collected from Schenectady's Historic Stockade District analyzed using the accelerator.

Chad Herrington - Chad is a rising junior Physics/Math double major working with Prof. Mike Vineyard on elemental analysis of aerosol samples from collected from Schenectady's Historic Stockade District analyzed using the accelerator.

Colin and Chad both presented posters at the Fall Meeting of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society in Santa Fe, NM, on Nov. 2-6, 2010.
Below are pictures of them at their presentation and links to their posters

Colin's Full Poster	Chad's Full Poster

Chad and Colin, along with Shivani Pathak, also presented posters at the Joint Meeting of the New York State and New England Sections of the American Physical Society at Union College in Schenectady, NY, on April 23-24, 2010.
Below are pictures of them presenting and links to their full posters

Shivani's Poster	Chad's Poster	Colin's Poster

Here are pictures of Maria, Katie Schuff, and Rob Moore presenting their summer research posters at Union College for the first Colloquium of the year.

Here are links for Katie's Poster, Rob's Poster, and Colin Turley's Poster