Research Experiences for Undergraduates

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has renewed our grant for a Research Experiences for Undergraduates program in the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based Sciences and Education (CLASSE), which encompasses accelerator-physics research and X-ray science.

Naomi Gendler

Naomi Gendler, a senior at Reed College in Portland, Oregon took part in Cornell's Research Experiences for Undergraduates summer program. [Jason Koski/University Photography]

Under our programs, approximately two CLASSE science and engineering students from around the country will be invited to participate in research at the CHESS. There are several other REU programs on campus with whom we share housing and programs. Each CLASSE participant will receive a $5,000 stipend for their summer research work at CLASSE.

The REU programs are open, by NSF regulation, only to US citizens and permanent residents. If accepted, you will be required to show proof of citizenship or permanent residency. These CLASSE programs are intended primarily for sophomore and junior students in science and engineering. In exceptional cases first year students could have enough familiarity with physics, engineering, or computer science to profit from their research experience. Students who have not yet enrolled as undergraduates and students who will have a Bachelors degree by the summer of 2021 are not eligible according to NSF regulations. If accepted, you will have to show proof of health insurance coverage for the period of the REU Programs.

Please note that our REU programs don't abide by the common NSF REU deadline for the student acceptance because none of other comparable sites that offer accelerator physics internships are affiliated with the NSF. If you receive an offer letter from us, you will be asked to inform us of your decision within the timeline that it specifies.

The ten-week program will start Monday, June 7, 2021 and ends Friday, August 13, 2021. In addition to participation in research, the program will include informal seminars, formal lectures, tours of research facilities, social and recreational events, and a forum at summer's end in which participants will present the results of their research.

Interested? Here are the next steps:

MENTOR STUDENT 2021 PROJECT ABSTRACT
Jacob Ruff & Purnima Ghale TBD "Neural nets inspired by X-ray image analysis"

 

 Intended applications have strongly influenced to development of popular neural networks -- consider the influence of computer vision, control theory, and statistical mechanics questions on the current state of Convolutional, Generative-Adversarial, and Restricted Boltzmann Machine neural networks. As we work at CHESS to build custom tools to analyze the reciprocal space of quantum materials, what computational graphs and network architectures do they imply? We seek an REU researcher to help investigate these questions, working at the boundary between x-ray science, materials science, and data science.
Kate Shanks TBD "Development of a detector simulation testbench for CHESS timing mode" Experiments that use fast, gated detectors to exploit the pulse structure of storage ring sources allow us to probe the structure and behavior of matter at the picosecond timescale. However, these experiments can push the boundaries of the temporal response of standard area detectors, especially at high photon energies where high-Z and/or thick sensors are required. This project will be centered on developing a suite of code to simulate the sensor and front-end detector electronics response to single bunches of x-rays, with a focus on evaluating detector performance for various fill patterns that have been proposed for a possible CHESS timing mode.