Hey, I'm Grant!
So What’s my Background? My undergraduate degree is in physics from Centre College in Kentucky. While at Centre, I had to opportunity to conduct research both at my home institution, and at a couple outside labs. I got my start in research doing robophysics research with Dr. Bruce Rodenborn at Centre. Our robophysics experiments were aimed at better understanding animal locomotion through creating robotic models. I later interned at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (think: “Houston, we have a problem here”) working on mission safety by modeling launch abort scenarios for commercial crew vehicles and identifying failure modes.
I then entered the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program through the US Department of Energy, through which I first completed an internship at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL). At PPPL, I helped to develop a low noise amplifier that would operate in a cryogenic environment for a beam emission spectroscopy (BES) system. This instrument was modeled off the BES installed on NSTX-U, the tokamak at PPPL, and is intended for use on W7-X, the stellarator in Griefswald, Germany.
Lastly, I completed a second SULI internship at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) in the bay area the summer after graduation, and stayed on as a post-bac until starting graduate school the next year. At LBNL, I worked on a type of compact radio-frequency (RF) linear accelerator called a MEQALAC. The goal of this research was to develop a particle accelerator that was smaller and more affordable than the alternatives. This would allow linear accelerators (linacs) to be used in more labs and for more applications. While there, I also led a team to develop a Python package for instrument control which my division needed in order to operate their accelerators. Then I started my PhD at CU Boulder in RF electronics!
How Did You Get Into RF Electronics?
Because RF is crucial for the types of physics experiments I’m passionate about! At LBNL, our linac used RF electric fields to accelerate the ion beam, so naturally, good RF systems were crucial to the success of our design. Similarly, RF electronics are used to heat the plasma in most fusion technologies, establishing RF as a critical research area for both fusion energy and particle physics. I believe that by coupling a background in RF electronics with my physics expertise, I can contribute a unique and diverse perspective to research projects.