Students receive Blood award
The Blood scholarship was awarded to USU students Linsey Johnson, Jeffrey Hazboun, Scott Jensen and Charlie Sim, to assist them in their physics research during summer 2010.
“Recipients can use the scholarship money for whatever they want,” said USU physics professor David Peak. “It depends on how many students receive the scholarship each year, but I think it is about $3,000.”
Howard Blood is a physics alumnus of USU. He donated to the physics department the year before he died in 2006, Jensen said. Recipients of the scholarship write letters to Blood’s family to tell them about their research.
Peak said a scholarship committee meets each spring to determine which students are awarded scholarships, including the Blood scholarship.
Students in the physics department can apply for the scholarship, and it can be awarded to both undergraduate and graduate students, Peak said. Johnson, Jensen and Sim are undergraduate students and Hazboun is a graduate student.
Five years ago, the USU physics department was granted the ability to award the scholarship and they first presented it to students three years ago, Peak said. He estimated that the committee has selected 10 students to be honored with the scholarship since then.
Sim said preference for the scholarship is given to physics majors who plan on attending graduate school and can prove they have financial need. Applicants write a one-page letter explaining their research intentions, past experience and qualifications. A recommendation letter from the professor with whom the applicant plans to conduct the research is also required.
The selected students carry out summer research and give a 15-minute presentation on their findings to the physics department faculty, students and staff at a colloquium in the fall, Sim said. It took place Sept. 7.
“We are also required to present our findings at another forum, I am going to Albuquerque next week to report my research again,” Sim said.
Jensen conducted research on ablation therapy with Timothy Doyle, research associate professor for the physics department. He explored nanoparticles and their effect on cancer cells.
“Nanoparticles are 1/20,000 the width of a hair,” Jensen said.
When these particles attach to cancer cells, they heat up and kill the cancer. Jensen said the goal of the research is to discover why the particles heat up and how much they heat up.
Jensen said he used his scholarship to stay in Logan for the summer and further his research. Sim worked with Professor J.R. Dennison exploring electrostatic discharge from materials used in space. Plastics used for spacecraft discharge static and can be destroyed in the space environment, Sim said.
Sim said his goal is to develop a model, given the voltage and temperature, to find out how long before a material degrades in space.
Johnson worked with assistant professor Shane Larson and High Altitude Reconnaissance Balloon for Outreach and Research (HARBOR) in a high-altitude atmospheric profiling project at Weber State University. She said her job was to measure each of the variables of the atmosphere: temperature, pressure and air density.
“We sent the weather balloons 100,000 feet in the air and recorded the data on the ascent and descent then compared our data with the standard atmospheric model,” Johnson said.
The data they collected is necessary for interpreting other experiments done with HARBOR, including the flight dynamics of the balloon and dust particle monitoring experiments that HARBOR is also flying, Johnson said.
–marissa.bodily@aggiemail.usu.edu