Two physics majors were awarded the American Physical Society Future of Physics Day March Meeting Student Travel Awards, making it possible for them to attend and present research at one of the largest international physics conferences in the world.
Senior Christopher Reehil and junior William Manners, who goes by Alex, have been awarded this travel grant in order to make their trip to the APS 2013 March Meeting financially possible.
The physics majors will go to Baltimore on March 18 to present their research at, according to the APS website.
According to both Reehil and Manners, this award will allow all of their expenses to be reimbursed during the conference and is the reason they are both able to attend this meeting.
"I feel honored receiving this award," Reehil said. "If I didn't receive it, I most likely would not be able to attend the conference since the hotels and gas prices are not cheap."
Manners agreed, saying that without the award he would not be able to afford the cost of the trip. Both students said they are excited to travel and meet other physicists from around the country.
"Winning this award means that I will be able to attend the conference, which I normally would not be able to," Reehil said. "It will give me great experience in the field and will allow me to meet many people and make contacts that could help me get a job."
Manners said he sees it as an opportunity to make connections that will help him later on.
"Making connections is huge in this day and age, and a meeting like this can provide great opportunities for my future," Manners said.
"Having physicists come together to collaborate is also beneficial to the members of the public who are not physicists," Manners said, "Scientific breakthroughs are rarely an individual accomplishment, with many advances in science being made by teams."
During the March Meeting, Reehil and Manners will present scientific research with the help of their mentors, Dr. Weining Wang and Dr. M. Alper Sahiner. Manners said that he could not give complete details about the research because his mentors wished to keep the majority of their information "fairly secretive."
However, he said that the research was in the field of solar cells.
"We deposit thin films on a glass substrate using a pulse laser deposition system," Manners said.
Reehil said that his research involves solar panels.
"As for my research, the most prominent would be a co-op with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to make more efficient solar cells, or solar panels on a small scale," Reehil said.
Reehil also added that the idea behind all of these projects is to improve the commercially available silicon solar panels, which only use about 20 percent of the sun's energy. Ways of improving the solar panels include making them cheaper to fabricate and more efficient in their absorption of solar energy.
The students said this meeting will be greatly beneficial not only to their future careers, but to their concepts and perspective of physics.
"Meetings like this offer a chance to bounce ideas off colleagues in the physics community and perhaps gain a new perspective," Manners said.
Erica Szczepaniak can be reached at erica.szczepaniak@student.shu.edu.
