Jillian Guthrie ’20 was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This fellowship recognizes outstanding graduate students in STEM fields, providing a stipend, tuition allowance, and opportunities for professional development and international research. Only three graduating seniors from Union have won this award in the last 25 years.
Majors: Physics and Mathematics
Minor: Spanish
Hometown: Templeton, Mass.
Activities: Society of Physics Students (past vice president and current president), Math Club (current treasurer), Physics Help Center tutor, teaching assistant for Physics-120, course assistant for Math-110, Wold House past co-chair, tour guide and volunteer curator at the Narragansett Historical Society.
Research
· Isothermal Crystallization of Poly(vinyl alcohol-co-ethylene), Union College (fall 2019 to spring 2020)
· Fourier Analysis and using Fourier Series to look at convergence, Union College (winter 2020)
· Modeling of Bacterial Motility Patterns, Technic Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany (summer 2019)
· Optimizing an Undergraduate Laboratory to Measure Fundamental Constants Experimentally, Union College (winter 2019)
· Computationally Modeling RNA with Statistical Mechanics, Union College (spring to summer 2018)
· Extraction and Organization of Data by Fabry-Perot interferometers from the Madrigal Database, Computation Physics Inc. New England, North Chelmsford, Mass. (spring to fall 2016)
Awards
Goldwater Scholarship, DAAD Research Internships in Science and Engineering Germany, NASA Summer Research Space Grant, Union College Scholars Program
Career Goals
“I plan to get my Ph.D. in Biophysics. By applying my computational experience and mathematical knowledge, I will be able to create accurate models of biological systems. I plan to explore polymers both experimentally and computationally in the future, which will bridge together in biomaterials research. These biomaterials such as meshes and films would have many applications in energy storage and biological systems, my preferred applied field. I am especially interested in virus assembly and bacterial motion. I intend to become a professor and work with students, both locally and internationally.”