Eli Ochshorn, PhD 2008.
Eli
worked on thin films of water and freezing. He was an Assistant
Professor in Physics at SUNY Postdam, but I've since lost touch with
him.Kristopher Bunker, Masters 2012. Kris started working with me on contact freezing as an undergraduate. He stayed at Michigan Tech for his Masters and is now a Physics lab instructor in Denver.
Xinxin (Zoe) Woodward, Masters 2014. Zoe worked with me on calorimetry and the microstructure of ice. In the end, the signal we were looking for was just barely out of the noise, and if you were skeptical, not even that. We ended up not publishing the results. Zoe stayed at Michigan Tech for her Masters, investigating the three dimensional shape and surface roughness of mineral dust, using atomic force microscopy. She is now Dr. Xinxin Woodward, receiving her PhD from Wayne State.
Joseph Niehaus, PhD 2015. I first met Joseph when I visited Michael Larsen at College of Charleston. Mike worked with Alex Kostinski as a graduate student here. I was a member of his PhD committee. He's now a Professor at C of C. Joseph came here despite the fact that he grew up in a place that has snow on the ground for only three or four days per year.
Sarita Karki, Masters 2017. Sarita's project was to quantify aerosol removal rates in the Pi Chamber.
Jesse Anderson, Masters 2018, PhD 2022. Jesse worked on understanding the saturation ratio in the Pi Chamber.
Nurun Nahar Lata, PhD 2021. Nurun Nahar started with water on mica, a project that I had with Sapna Sarupria. She also worked with Swarup China at Pacific Northwest National Lab, as part of an internship program there.
Abu Sayeed Md Shawon, PhD 2021. Shawon inherited part of Sarita's project, and extended it to an explicit investigation of removal rates of aerosol particles in a cloudy, turbulent environment. We also did some work on removal rates of particles in Rayleigh-Benard convection in a dry conditions. Shawon also did an internship at PNNL.
Elise Rosky, PhD 2023. (co-advised with Raymond Shaw) Elise began with a project that neither Raymond nor I could provide direct guidance for - molecular dynamics simulations of water under tension. Elise then decided to take an abrupt turn into field work, participating in field campaigns out of Houston with the HOLODEC.
Jonna Kannosto (see below), Michael Larsen, me, and Alex Kostinski in the first lab I had here, in 2001. The lab I have now is much better equipped.
Current students are Kadja Flore GALI, Swafuva Varappillikudy Sulaiman and James Simmons.
Undergraduate students
Jessica Tracey Jess was the first undergraduate to work with me when I came to Michigan Tech. She received a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) award to study the deliquescence of salt, a topic I had started as a postdoc at Indiana. She worked for Cirque du Soleil for a while as a lighting technician.
Jonna Kannosto
(exchange student from Finland). She went on to receive her PhD
from Tampere University in Finland.Christopher Occhipinti
David Harrington I still recall a conversation I had with Dave about applying to graduate school. I had listed a few schools I thought he might apply to, and he rejected all of them. Why? It snowed in those places. Four years here was enough. Dave is now a senior scientist at an observatory in Hawai'i.
Carly Robinson Carly received funds from the Michigan Space Grant Consortium (MSGC) to study ice processes relevant for biomass burning aerosols. She is currently a Senior Product Strategist at the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientifc and Technical Information.
Carly preparing the waiting time experiment in the new lab. This is the most recent lab I've had here. It was 4 walls and some power outlets when I got it. It looked a lot more like a lab once we got cabinets, fume hood, etc.. in place. (This photo is obviously staged. Carly couldn't pour liquid nitrogen from the dewar she is holding into the other one because the waiting time experiment stage is on it.)
Caleb Carlin
Stephanie (Irish) Aho Stephanie received an award from the MSGC to study ice nucleation. She received the Goldwater Scholarship in 2008.
Anthony Hegg
Paul Schou
Alexandria (Blanchard) Johnson
Anthony Szedlak Alexandria and Tony investigated the microstructure of ice, using differential scanning calorimetry. I became interested in this when Alex Kostinski and I started looking at the entropy of liquids and decided to pursue that in relation to the latent heat of freezing. Alexandria had just come back from a year in Australia and was looking for a research project. I gave her three choices, one of which was the calorimetry of freezing water. I told her that I wouldn't be able to help much with the technical aspects because I had never worked with the instrument before. She chose it anyway, and Tony took over the project when Alexandria graduated. That work resulted in a publication in J. Phys. Chem. A. Alexandria is now an Assistant Professor at Purdue. Tony received his PhD from Michigan State in 2017.
Eric Petersen
Nigel Anton Nigel worked with me on a senior research project. I read something about crystalloluminescence when I was working with George Ewing at Indiana. (George was extremely well read in the history of science and had gotten me started on an investigation of some of the more recent literature - 1700s or so.) Nigel set up an experiment to try to detect flashes of light as water crystallizes. We never did see anything, but I later learned that this does happen; we just didn't happen on the right combination of parameters.
Darcy Jacobson Darcy worked with me on a project the summer after her sophomore year. The following year she worked with Laura Iraci at NASA Ames, then particpated in the German Academic Exchange (DAAD) program the following summer. She's currently working in the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Aviation Applications program.
Emily Makoutz
Ashima Chhabra (MiCUP) Ashima was the first student I worked with through the Michigan College University Partnership. She studied mineral dust with an atomic force microscope that first summer and received an MSGC award to continue the work the following summer.
E-Yasmine Walton-Durst (MiCUP) Yasmine studied contact freezing. Honestly the results that she got really, really surprised me. I thought she would see the exact opposite of what she observed. Apparently a film of a high molecular weight organic compound does not significantly change the ability of mineral dust to act as a contact nucleus.
fall 2016: E Yasmine came back to Michigan Tech as a student in Chemistry and worked on data associated with the overall flow patterns in the Pi Chamber.
Karl Meingast
Keylor Lerchen (MiCUP)
Savannah de Luca
Angela Small
Logan Pauli
Andrew Robare
Parker Schimler
Jimmy Spaight
Paul Bosko
Gregory Kinney Greg received funding (summer 2016) from MSGC to study collection of black carbon aerosol by cloud droplets in the cloud chamber. Greg kept the Pi Chamber up and running for us for three years, then left to start his won business.
Taylor Kaminski
Crystal Massoglia
Jonathon Berman Jon worked with me to develop a method to measure the effect of strain on a growing ice film on a sheet of mica.
Ilhan Onder (as a high school student) Ilhan worked on understanding the temperature and airflow in the chamber, and how it is coupled with the large scale circulation. He's now an undergradate at the University of Michigan.
Noah Wilson Noah worked with me in the summer of 2018 to put together a compendium of what we have done so far with temperature and air velocity measurements in the chamber.
Alexa Otto (U North Dakota) Alexa worked with me in the summer of 2018 in an effort to understand the properties of liquid smoke (like what you would buy for your bar-b-q) as CCN. This was part of a larger effort to try to use the Cloud Chamber to study the products of biomass burning.
Marc Fritts
Kaiden O'Neill (summer 2020) The pandemic and its associated restrictions and precautions made summer research an interesting experiment, in and of itself.
Griffin Hall (College of Charleston) Griffin came up for the summer (twice) with Mike Larsen. He picked up some of the work initially started by Nurun Nahar, then advanced in various ways by J.D. Brandewie and Kaiden. Griffin got a beautiful set of freezing rates data on glass slides and mica. Pure water on mica tried his patience, but he stuck with it.
Lili Boss (College of Charleston) Lili came up for the summer with Mike Larsen. She worked on a project to capture and analyze individual rain drops.