Two MSE affiliated students, Alexander Yepikhin (left) and Parth Bhide (right), have been selected for the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Award for 2019. Alex is a first year MSE graduate student doing research in the Ullal and Palermo groups. Parth is a senior in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Materials Engineering who has been doing research in the Ullal group since his freshman year. The three year fellowship recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF supported STEM disciplines.
Alex will use his fellowship to create and study new polymers that will allow him to achieve both high throughput and nanoscale resolutions in maskless 3D nanolithography. State of the art tools to achieve 3D lithography with nanoscale fidelity and resolutions are either prohibitively slow or require tools that costs millions of dollars. Alex envisages leveraging recent groundbreaking advances from the Ullal and Palermo groups that combine photoswitchable molecules with state of the art optics inspired by the Nobel Prize winning technique of STED microscopy to achieve his goals.
Parth, in turn, expects the GRFP will have a large impact on his work, as he prepares to begin his Ph.D. in Materials Science at the University of Minnesotta in the Fall. He credits the research and courses that he did in the Materials Department as playing a crucial role in crystallizing his ambition to pursue a career in academics in the field of Polymer Science. Polymers, taught by Prof. Ed Palermo, was his favorite course at RPI, and his research experience has already led to a co-authored peer reviewed publication in Langmuir.
An important component of the Fellowship is weighted towards broader societal impacts. Both Alex and Parth are very strongly motivated by inspiring the next generation of materials scientists and engineers. Parth has been deeply involved in outreach through the Engineering Ambassadors program at RPI, and the hands on learning workshops he developed have been used across NY state from the Bronx to cities across the Hudson Valley. Alex intends to expand on his existing contributions, which include having helped start a Science Olympiad program at Rensselaer Middle School, by participating in RPI’s extensive outreach efforts and running hands on learning workshops at two high needs schools in Troy and Watervliet.