Headshot taken during internship at NASA Goddard
Author: Jade Thomas | Major: Mechanical Engineering, Physics | Semester: Spring 2024
My name is Jade Thomas, and I am a part of the College of Engineering and the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. I am double majoring with honors in Mechanical Engineering, with a concentration in Aerospace, and Physics, with a concentration in Astronomy, with a minor in Nanotechnology. My mentor is Dr. Wan Shou of the Mechanical Engineering Department. This blog post is for the Spring 2024 semester of funding. I graduate this May. After graduation, I will be working full-time as a Systems Engineer for a NASA contractor called Peraton. I will be working on ground systems for the NASA Artemis missions. This fall, I will start graduate school for my Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.
This research focuses on find optimal parameters for laser sintering copper nanoparticles for integrated circuit production. Typical integrated circuit production is laborious and toxic, however, laser sintering copper nanoparticles can speed up this process while avoiding multi-step fabrications with harmful byproducts. My work assisted a graduate student, whose bigger picture goal is to establish optimal parameters for short-wavelength laser sintering, which could revolutionize the integrated circuit manufacturing process, resulting in cleaner, faster, and cheaper production. I primarily experimented with different laser parameters utilizing a CO2 laser, then analyzed the scan patterns under a microscope.
I took Introduction to Materials with Dr. Shou in Fall 2021. Shortly after, in Spring 2022, we began discussing my Honors College Research requirement, and Dr. Shou became my advisor. Following that, I began working in his lab in Fall 2022. I started out in literature review, reading interesting papers and searching for a topic I was interested in, while assisting graduate students with work where needed. Halfway through the fall semester, I found my topic, Shape Memory Polymers (SMPs). I read several papers about SMPs and was intrigued by their properties and potential applications in the aerospace community. After discussing them with Dr. Shou, he informed me about an under-studied SMP that I could begin testing. Towards the end of the fall semester, I began extensive testing of the specific SMP, focusing on pushing the limits of its abilities and investigating how its properties change with different manufacturing methods. I continued this research into Spring and Fall 2023, where I received Honors College funding for both semesters. I finally finished this work in Spring 2024, when I also successfully defended my honors thesis about this work in the Mechanical and Physics departments.
Following the completion of this work, I wanted to continue research for this semester on a new topic, that could allow me to acquire new skills. While I utilized some laser processing in my honors thesis work, I wanted to dive more into that area, and so I joined this project with a graduate student and applied for Honors College funding. I have talked more extensively about challenges I faced during research in my previous two semesters of blog posts. With this semester, I did not have much difficulty with the research itself, as I was working directly with a graduate student. My main hurdle was just time allocation, as since I am graduating this semester, I was balancing 5 different projects that all needed to be completed before May, making my semester very busy, and making it difficult to dedicate time to research some weeks.
As with the previous semesters, I received much support from graduate students in the lab, especially the one I was working directly with, and from my faculty mentor, Dr. Shou. I would not be able to perform this research without their training and guidance, and the support of the Honors College. After every completed experiment, I analyze the data and discuss it with Dr. Shou and the graduate student in order to know I am taking the right approach and that the results are sound and usable.
As I stated at the beginning, I am graduating this semester. My research at Georgia Tech will focus on Model Based Systems Engineering for complex aerospace systems, so a completely different direction from my undergraduate research in Materials and Additive Manufacturing.