Nearly 40% of the world’s population will be diagnosed with some form of cancer in their lifetime.¹  The current treatment for such diseases usually includes a combination of invasive surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. The focus is on chemotherapy as it is the first line treatment in most cases.

Volcanologists strive to forecast the likelihood, magnitude, and style of eruptions. The competition between gas retention and release exert a major control on magma ascent and eruption, but the mechanisms to predict volcanic eruptions remain unresolved. To contribute to this grand challenge, I apply volcano petrology as a forensic discipline to reconstruct the dynamics of magma ascent in the Earth’s interior and the eruption dynamics of active volcanoes.

Energy storage is an essential enabler for future sustainable technologies by linking renewable resources with the power grid. Following the great success of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in the commercial consumer electronics market, the increasing demand for improved energy density, lifetime, and safety in large-scale and power-intensive device applications calls for new materials with novel structures.

Helium nanodroplets provide a cold, inert, and optically transparent environment for doping atomic and molecular species. Helium's weak interaction with dopants is minimally perturbing, and facilitates the collection of high-resolution vibrational and rotational spectra. An instrument was designed that facilitates the ionization of dopant molecules using resonant two-photon ionization. Excitation of the molecular ions then occurs using a tunable OPO/OPA infrared laser.

Shock waves travelling through a material generate incredible amounts of pressure and cause irreversible changes in said material. Observing mechanical and chemical changes in an energetic material under shock is of particular interest in the study of detonations. Until recently, most experimental measurements of shock waves and shock induced chemistry have been limited to the nanosecond scale. Ultrafast Dynamic Ellipsometry (UDE) is a single-shot, picosecond scale probe of the transit of a shock through a condensed matter sample.