My ongoing research with Dr. Wei Zhao at the Digital Radiological Imaging Lab is focused on studying eliminating the issue of scatter in mammography and digital breast tomosynthesis, particularly using carbon-interspace antiscatter grids.

I worked with Dr. Colleen Marlow in the physics department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, using Atomic Force Microscopy to characterize the morphology of fractal networks of Carbon Nanotube (CNT) thin films. These thin films are used by the group as the active layer for electronic biosensing devices. On a practical level, I have been trained on an Asylum AFM (topography) and have been successful in capturing clear and detailed images of CNT thin films.

I also worked with Dr. Marlow on my senior project which involved developing an experiment to assess the degree to which plant roots are fractal in nature and how this is affected by environmental factors. My goal, as a pioneer of this project, was to determine the best method to run such an experiment and conduct preliminary tests. This involved an investigation of the optimal growth structure for roots confined to both two and three directions of spatial growth, developing imaging techniques for seedling structures with appropriate lighting and contrast, followed by a computational analysis of processed root images using a box counting algorithm in FracLac  (ImageJ) to determine the fractal dimension for each root. I created a comprehensive lab procedure for the fractal analysis experiment, and determine fractal dimensions for samples of Maestro peas, bush beans, and Arabidopsis thaliana. Here, I had a chance to delve a little bit into biological physics and how it is observed in nature.

I also had the opportunity to participate in computational research with Dr. David Strubbe, as part of the UC Merced Physics REU. I worked extensively on density functional theory calculations in the Octopus real-space code to study ionization due to electron temperature in graphene. This was a step towards understanding the microscopic mechanisms of high-energy plasma formation, to be applied to the optimization of inertial confinement fusion experiments. The main part of my work involved computing the electron density for various electronic temperatures, through the Fermi-Dirac distribution, to assess the degree of loss of electron density to the vacuum. I created a visualization of an isosurface of charge at each temperature and examining its distance from the atomic plane. I further studied this effect in a quantitative manner by integrating the charge density at each temperature to determine the distance from the carbon atoms that was necessary to contain a given percentage of the total electron density.