Blewett Scholarship Winners Announced
By Michael Lucibella
The American Physical Society awarded five M. Hildred Blewett
scholarships this year to women returning to their careers after a
hiatus, the largest number of winners since the beginning of the
program.
Chosen by the APS Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, the
five include three new recipients and two returning recipients from
last year. Amy Daradich of the University of Ottawa and Leslie Kerby
at Los Alamos National Laboratory first received scholarships in 2013,
while Ani Tshantshapanyan of North Carolina Central University,
Monique Tirion of Clarkson University, and Lusaka Bhattacharya of
Oklahoma State University are new.
The scholarship is a one-year grant of up to $45,000 that can be used
towards a wide range of necessities, including equipment procurement,
salary, travel, tuition, and dependent care. This is the tenth year
the scholarship has been awarded.
Ani Tshantshapanyan was first drawn to physics during high school in
Armenia. “My parents are chemists, they’re also PhDs,” she said. “I
grew up in that environment of science.”
She received her PhD in semiconductor physics from the Yerevan State
University. At the same time, she had also been working as a
laboratory assistant and then as a senior lecturer at the department
of applied physics at the Russian-Armenian University, also in
Yerevan, Armenia.
Then in 2012 her husband Karen, who also has a doctorate in physics,
took a job in Durham, North Carolina. “We moved to a different country
and finding a secure job was not easy,” Tshantshapanyan said.
After her third child was born last June, Tshantshapanyan decided to
step away from research for a short while to spend more time raising
her three children. “After about one year I started to search for a
position,” Tshantshapanyan said.
Through her husband, she found a postdoc position at North Carolina
State University studying the complex geometry of quantum dots, which
have been used in detectors and lasers.
“My research is about the physical properties of so-called quantum
dots,” she said.
“Properties of quantum dots can be controlled by their external shape
and many other physical properties.”
With the help of the Blewett fellowship, she hopes to publish more
papers on her research, as well as develop software to further her
work. She hopes also to establish contacts with other research
institutions nearby and ultimately find a private company to
collaborate with in order to commercialize the kind of quantum dots
she’s been helping to develop.
Monique Tirion is returning to physics in order to work on better
understanding the dynamics of proteins. X-ray crystallography is a
well-established method for studying the makeup of proteins that make
life possible. However, it turns out that scientists have been seeing
only part of the story. “So people have been admiring these static
images for a long time,” Tirion said. “We can take it a step
further… We can make those static images [into] dynamic images.”
Using software she has been helping to develop, she has been able to
calculate the normal vibrational modes of the different proteins based
on their shapes. The work has helped explain some of the finer points
of how these protein systems behave. “It’s not an easy computation,
but if you carry it through, the insights you gain from it can be very
exciting,” Tirion said. “The static images really can’t elucidate how
all of these little mysteries are resolved.”
She said she’s always been driven by her fascination with the
biological sciences and trying to understand how the world works and
what makes things happen. “It’s just a natural evolution,” Tirion
said. “The world around us is so astounding, the trees and the flowers
and whatnot. My effort to understand that naturally came to this
scale, nanoscale where I’m working.”
Tirion attended Texas A&M University for her undergraduate degree in
physics, and then Boston University for her PhD. There she met Daniel
Ben-Avraham, her future husband. Shortly after receiving her
doctorate, her husband took a job at Clarkson University in upstate
New York. The two moved to the small town of Potsdam, and a short time
later her son Yoel was born.
Yoel was born with three health issues. “All three individually take
some effort to supervise, but all three at the same time was a bit
overwhelming, so I decided to give it my full attention.”
She carefully monitored his diet and homeschooled Yoel until he
started the 7th grade, and today he is much healthier. With Yoel doing
well, Tirion has been able to return to research. Thanks to the
Blewett support, she hopes to take the recent work she’s been doing on
proteins even further.
“I would like to make it more easily available to the
crystallographers,” Tirion said. “I’m not sure where it will go, but
I’m just analyzing these systems and sharing them with the
crystallographers, and seeing where it takes me.”
Lusaka Bhattacharya grew up in India and had always been interested in
the sciences. “Physics is very interesting to me because in physics
you have mathematics, a theoretical part, and you have an experimental
part,” Bhattacharya said. “My mom is also a mathematician so I decided
that that means I would study physics.”
She studied theoretical nuclear physics at the Saha Institute of
Nuclear Physics in India and received her PhD from the University of
Calcutta in 2012. Studying nuclear physics there, she focused on
studying the quark-gluon plasma, and traveled a great deal to present
her work around the world. “It is a very new field so you can explore
a lot,” Bhattacharya said. She added that the idea of learning about
what made up the universe just an instant after the Big Bang was what
attracted her to the field.
While working on her doctorate, she met her husband, and the two
married in 2010. He finished his degree early and traveled first to
Helsinki, and then to Oklahoma, for his postdoc work. After
Bhattacharya finished her doctorate in 2012, she moved to Oklahoma to
join her husband. “My husband is a theoretical physicist like me, but
it is very difficult to get a postdoctoral position in the same
university,” she said.
It was the first time the two had been able to live in the same city
for an extended period of time. Bhattacharya decided to take some time
away from research and start a family. Earlier this year, her first
child was born. “Now he’s almost nine months old so now I think I
should start my career again,” she said.
She started volunteering at Oklahoma State University and
collaborating with her mentor at Kent State University. She’s helping
to develop a photon probe for detecting when particle collisions have
created a quark-gluon plasma.
For more on the Blewett scholarships, see the M. Hildred Blewett
Fellowship web page.
(c)1995 – 2014, AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
From: Baghdasarian