On Friday, October 31 we were visited by the JMU Physics Alumnus of the Year, Sharon Koh. She spent the afternoon with faculty members, touring the department, and then she gave a seminar talk to the junior and senior physics majors discussing the work she’s done since graduating from JMU. After her talk, I was fortunate enough to sit with her for a few m
inutes and ask her a few questions to share with our readers. Below is a transcription of our conversation:
Can you start by
giving us a brief outline from the time of your work at JMU until the present?
I
got my Bachelor’s from JMU in 2002. I double majored in Chemistry and Physics
and I double minored in Material Science and Mathematics. I went to
Northwestern for grad school and finished that in 2007. My PhD was in Chemistry
with a focus on materials chemistry; I worked with Tobin Marks and Mark Ratner.
From there I went to Milliken and worked 6 years in industry, and now I’m at
the Naval Research Laboratory as an ASEE postdoctoral fellow.
What would you say is
your favorite project that you worked on?
That’s
kind of a difficult question. Nobody’s asked me that before. When I was at
Northwestern, probably the most interesting thing to me was the band structure
stuff that I did just because nobody had ever done it before. So it was a good
challenge that actually panned out. When we initially did it, we saw flat bands
and we thought, “Okay, this isn’t interesting, we can’t publish this.” But then
we were able to digress from there and, because we were creative enough and
came up with different areas and reciprocal space to study, we actually were
able to make the band structures turn into something that was useful and
productive.
At
Milliken, the carpet-printing project was probably the most interesting project
because I was project manager, but I was involved in some of the science even
though I wasn’t the engineer. I was doing manual work with the rest of the
guys, putting those bars up in the plant when we went to commercialize, so we
basically took it all the way from a prototype that was 1.5 inches all the way
to 168 inches in a year and a half. They originally wanted us to do it in less
than that; they’d given us 8 months originally. We could have done it, but
there would have been a lot of flaws. We finally convinced them that we needed
a little extra time. After we converted that broad loom machine I moved on to
my other projects, but the rest of the engineers stayed on and ended up
converting some tile machines over because they were so happy with the results,
so it was a good success story. Also, because of that, we bought some equipment
for the machine shop as well that they hadn’t had before, and because it was
such a success on the broad loom, they ended up upgrading that machine to
something bigger that could do more, which was a good capability for the
company.
How long have you
been at the Naval Research Laboratory and what have you been working on?
I’ve
been there since December, so almost a year. I’m looking at decomposition of
energetic materials; specifically we’re looking at nitromines and RDX materials.
In the literature for the last 30-40-50 years, it’s been a known compound, but
still, people don’t know how it works, because it’s so dangerous and the nature
of how something like that detonates is so quick, it’s hard to have
instrumentation to capture what’s going on. Experimentally is sometimes the
best way to capture things, but if you can’t capture it experimentally, you
have to develop models to better understand them. So that’s what we’re working
on.
What was it like to
go from carpets to explosives?
It
was very different – it was interesting to read about them though. It is
definitely interesting literature. Always when you start a new research
project, what you end up doing is reading. Because you’re in a new area, you
have to understand what’s already been done; you don’t want to start blindly,
and so you end up reading a lot of papers, especially the first two weeks
you’re on any new project. It was definitely interesting to see what other
people had said about these energetic materials, and what’s even kind of scary
is how all over the board the literature is about these materials. There’ve
been so many studies out there, and almost everything gets published because
nobody really knows what goes on, and that’s scary. I think now it’s starting
to get to the point where people are starting to understand a little better and
they’re starting to narrow down what gets published, so we’ll see what we can
contribute to that.
- Keely Criddle
JMuse Cafe/Physics & Astronomy Blogger
