Iowa’s NSF GRFP winners
Below are the research projects of the five GRFP winners:
Johnathan Culpepper, Ph.D. student, Civil and Environmental Engineering
“My research reflects Dr. Michelle Scherer group's interests in soil and water interactions. Our primary focus is on minerals in water and soil and how they first interact within these environments and can be engineered to address persistent environmental pollutants. For the NSF Fellowship, I proposed that carbon and nitrogen cycles are interdependently influenced by a ‘novel’ iron-driven pathway. In the literature, there is limited understanding of nitrogen’s role in organic matter binding to Fe-oxides.”
Ananda Guneratne, Ph.D. student, Physics
“My research deals with photonics. I design and study optical metamaterials that manipulate light through sub-wavelength patterning in order to achieve effects such as anomalous refraction or frequency-selective reflection. I also work on solar cell technology involving micro- and nano-scale texturing of silicon.”
Maria Noterman, Ph.D. student, Biosciences
“My research project focuses on Cav1.2, the predominant calcium channel in the brain. In 2008, researchers analyzed the genomes of people with bipolar disorder and identified common variations in CACNA1C, the gene for Cav1.2. Since this discovery, CACNA1C has been implicated in other psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and autism spectrum disorders. In my project, I will investigate how the role of Cav1.2 in neuronal viability may relate to pathophysiologic events related to these forms of neuropsychiatric disease.”
Victoria Spring, Ph.D. student, Psychology
“There may be many tradeoffs in everyday life that people with low-socioeconomic status (SES) are forced to make, such as decisions of whether to take a sick child to the hospital or to pay rent on time. Chronic stress leads to physiological changes that may influence low-SES people’s judgments on their moral decisions. My research will use a mathematical modeling technique to explore how chronic SES-related stress influences the way people make moral decisions when they have to choose between following the moral "rules" versus acting in pursuit of the greater good.”
Jennifer Verniero, Ph.D. student, Applied Mathematical and Computational Sciences
“Energetic particles arising from violent activity on the Sun, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, pose a significant danger to both manned and unmanned spacecraft. It is difficult to predict where on Earth such particles will strike and the extent to which they will cause damage, such as through power outages. The propagation of energetic particles through the heliosphere typically follows the magnetic field. In turbulent astrophysical plasma such as the solar wind, though, the embedded magnetic fields are chaotically tangled. Magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon in which magnetic field lines break and reconnect, which causes severe energy release. This process most likely plays a significant role in this field line tangling. Using existing plasma simulations, my goal is to quantify the process of magnetic field line tangling based on refined models of solar wind turbulence, which will provide a framework for an improved understanding of transport of energetic particles in space.”