‘Out of all the unknowns in science, we have so much to discover’

HOUSTON – (Aug. 16, 2024) – Rice University graduate student Jaanita Mehrani said she enjoys “seeing the awe in people’s eyes when they are learning new things” ⎯ an experience she hoped to elicit for the members of the audience attending her talk on using new advanced materials to improve dark matter detection, delivered as part of the Smalley-Curl Institute’s (SCI) annual Summer Research Colloquium held Aug. 2 in Rice’s iconic Duncan Hall.

The event served not only as a platform for academic exchange but also a unique opportunity for students to hone their presentation skills in a professional setting. With 222 registered attendees, the event marked a significant increase in participation from the previous year, reflecting the growing interest in and importance of interdisciplinary research at Rice.

“Like its historical predecessors, SCI provides a forum for collaboration and seeks to stimulate interdisciplinary research,” said Junichiro Kono, who was named SCI director this spring, following Naomi Halas, who had previously led the organization since its establishment through the merger of two prior institutes, the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology and the Rice Quantum Institute (RQI).

“The merger of the two former institutes broadened the scope of the current SCI, whose research pursues three main vectors ⎯ nanoscience, quantum materials and quantum information science and technology,” Kono said.

Viewed through the prism of continuity with the annual event organized by RQI starting in 1987, the 2024 SCI Summer Research Colloquium was in its 38 ^th iteration. One of the main goals of the colloquium is to provide students with opportunities to give presentations in a professional setting, especially to a multidisciplinary audience. The presenters are undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdoctoral researchers.

“We are trying to create a conferencelike setting for students,” said Kono, who is Rice’s Karl F. Hasselmann Professor in Engineering and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, physics and astronomy and materials science and nanoengineering. “This way, they can really practice and work on perfecting their presentation skills.

“One key difference is that at conferences, audiences tend to be very specialized, whereas in this case, the audience is quite multidisciplinary. Here, say you are a physicist giving a presentation to biologists, chemists and engineers who might have no background in your field ⎯ as a presenter, you have a great challenge to overcome in making your talk understandable to nonexperts. So I think this is a very unique opportunity for students.”

The colloquium featured a packed agenda with 20 oral presentations and two poster sessions ⎯ one dedicated to undergraduates and another for graduate students and postdocs with a total of 72 posters. For the first time, the event included posters from SCI’s Thematic Working Interest Groups, self-assembled multidisciplinary groups that meet regularly throughout the year to bring new research ideas to light.

Presentations spanned a wide range of topics and disciplines, including single photons, quantum squeezing, quantum sensing, dark matter, atoms and molecules for biology, materials and green electronics, ultracold atoms and molecules, quantum simulation and dynamics, nanomaterials and nanoparticles, plasmonics and photocatalysis.

While the event is primarily focused on the Rice research community, Kono said he hopes it can also be leveraged to showcase Rice’s excellence in research and teaching to an external audience. This year, outside guests included representatives from federal agencies, international officials and industry members.

“Quantum mechanics is currently an important topic for industry, where more graduates with a strong background in quantum science are needed for developing quantum technologies, including quantum communications, computation and sensing,” Kono said. “There’s a workforce need for experts in quantum technology, and our graduates can really contribute to this field and the industry.”

The opening keynote address was delivered by Aditya Mohite, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, materials science and nanoengineering and director of the Rice Engineering Initiative for Energy Transition and Sustainability. Mohite spoke about his research breakthrough in perovskite-based solar cell stability, which was published in the journal Science earlier this summer.

“Alongside the Rice Center for Quantum Materials and the Rice Quantum Initiative, one of the cornerstones of the SCI is our Applied Physics Graduate Program (APP), with 97 students who join research groups across multiple departments in both engineering and the natural sciences,” Kono said.

Many of the graduate student presenters at the event were APP students, including Adam Johnston, who serves as president of the APP student association at Rice.

“The Applied Physics Graduate Program is the doctoral program under the Smalley-Curl Institute here at Rice,” Johnston said. “The idea of the program is that we can bring in students who have a strong physics background and then let them search for other fields that they might apply their expertise to. It’s the top-ranked applied physics program in the country.

“Rice is really good because it allows you to choose your own story; you can join any lab in the natural sciences or engineering departments as an applied physics student. The horizons are very broad,” said Johnston, whose research focuses on color centers in silicon known as T centers, which show promise as a potential platform for quantum networking experiments.

Kiran Kulkarni, another APP graduate student, said he appreciates the amount of academic freedom the program enables.

“It’s a great program ⎯ hands down one of the best in the country,” Kulkarni said. “Nobody holds you back on what you actually want to do, because they all want you to do the most interbranching, interdisciplinary research you can.”

Kulkarni said he welcomed the opportunity to present his work to a broader, more interdisciplinary audience as part of the colloquium ⎯ a sentiment shared by fellow graduate student Gabi Gagliano, who said she enjoys learning about what other people are working on because it helps put her own work in context and grasp the bigger picture.

“It’s kind of incredible ⎯ I mean, I knew Rice was an amazing place, but when I see other (principal investigators) or students present, it really shows me the applications,” said Gagliano, who studies applied physics and chemistry with a focus on microscopy and spectroscopy.

Gagliano said she picked Rice’s APP program because of its unique combination of fundamental science and applied research.

“If you’re loving research and science fundamentally, but you really also want to see where that science can be applied to help the world and develop something new, then applied physics at Rice is kind of the perfect place to combine those two,” Gagliano said.

The event concluded with awards for top presenters in a number of categories, including oral presentations, grad student and postdoc poster presentations, undergraduate poster presentations and people’s choice awards. Go here for more information about the winners.

Mehrani, who studies applied physics and electrical engineering, won silver in the oral presentations category. A Rice undergraduate alumna, Mehrani said she wanted to continue studying the two disciplines in graduate school, which is why she chose to pursue her doctoral work in the applied physics program at her undergraduate alma mater. She described APP as enabling her to have “the best of both worlds.”

“I wanted to focus on trying to design new experiments, so engineering comes into play with that; and then to actually understand why we’re doing the experiments ⎯ that’s where physics comes in: so engineering and physics,” she said.

Kono thanked the APP graduate student association, SCI faculty and staff, volunteer judges and outside sponsors Clarkson Aerospace, Syzygy Plasmonics and Toptica Photonics for their contributions to the event. Kono particularly highlighted the contribution of Alessandro Alabastri, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, who acted as the program chair for this year’s colloquium and “developed an exciting program,” he said.

“But, of course, none of this would happen without the participation of Rice’s great summer researchers, who each year accept the challenge of presenting their work, or the support of the Rice faculty and departments, who make these research opportunities happen,” Kono added.

Kono highlighted the fact that next year, the SCI Summer Research Colloquium will also serve as an occasion to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Nobel prize-winning discovery of the C-60 molecule ⎯ the buckyball ⎯ by Rice professors Richard Smalley and Robert Curl and University of Sussex professor Harold Kroto.

Summing up the spirit of the event, Gagliano said one of the most rewarding aspects of being a researcher is the ability “to take part in understanding our universe.”

“Nothing that is unknown is to be feared, it’s only to be understood. Out of all the unknowns in science, we have so much to discover and to understand … so there’s lots of excitement and more things to discover, and it’s never boring,” Gagliano said.

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This news release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

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Video is available at:

https://youtu.be/GoIO8umcjwQ  (Video by Brandon Martin/Rice University)

Image downloads:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13ojhjLsEKT646OT9OWOwvUoloVrQs-b9?usp=sharing

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Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of architecture, business, continuing studies, engineering, humanities, music, natural sciences and social sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,574 undergraduates and 3,982 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction, No. 2 for best-run colleges and No. 12 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.