By The National Laboratories Office
Two graduate students from Texas A&M University have been awarded research fellowship grants facilitated by the TAMUS National Laboratories Office Global Security Scholar (GSS) Fellowship program.
The GSS Fellowship program offers Texas A&M University System graduate students research fellowship funding for work in nuclear securities and safeguards research. The program is supported by funding from the Program for International Nuclear Energy in the National Laboratories Office of the Texas A&M University System.
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) has provided funding through the Center for Global Security and Cooperation and Sandia’s Campus Executive Program. The inaugural cohort of Texas A&M students awarded fellowships at SNL are Samuel Gailliot and Ryan Samuel.
Samuel Gailliot is a graduate student in the Statistics department who is originally from Wilmington, Ohio. His research interests are in statistical networks and Bayesian statistics for nuclear security. He commented, “I enjoy studying and finding connections between the wide range of topics on which my research will be built. This includes complexity, network and systems sciences. What I most enjoy about statistics specifically is the beauty and wide applicability of statistical techniques.”
He is impressed by scientists and statisticians he has met from the national labs and has always been interested in working for one of the labs. He is excited for the opportunity and potential projects and real work applications. Sam looks forward to learning more about the nuclear enterprise and visiting SNL in the future. He wants to continue his career as a research scientist after graduation.
Adam Willliams, Ph. D., Principal R&D Systems Engineer, SNL, who will be working with Gailliot said, “Leveraging Texas A&M’s growing expertise in statistical methods to evaluate complex systems is an exciting opportunity to collaborate and push the state-of-the-art. This partnership is exploring the cutting edge of developing and analyzing multilayer network models for better understanding critical national security missions. We look forward to transitioning these early successes into sustain relationship that support both advances in research and student development.”
Ryan Samuel is an Electrical Engineering Ph.D. student who was born in Washington D.C. and moved to College Station as a young child. His research interests include applying tools from micro/nano device fabrication, material science, and computer engineering to make discoveries in fields such as physics and biology. “I like having to learn and consider many different concepts and I really enjoy the creative sandbox space where I can design, fabricate and test many different ideas within a week time frame,” he said.
He is looking forward to collaborating with researchers at SNL, learning more about the lab and working on projects that address global security. He is especially excited to work in particle physics research because he wanted to be a particle physicist in elementary school, an interest which he carried through to his undergraduate work on a plasma detector. He would like to continue his research endeavors after graduation.
In response to his award, Samuel said, “I would just like thank Texas A&M and the NanoBio Systems Lab for being such a great place for opportunity, Sandia National Labs for selecting me to collaborate with and my mom as my source of inspiration.”
Michael Hamel, Ph.D., Senior R&D Nuclear Engineer, SNL, who will be working with Samuel said, “We are excited to partner with TAMU’s AggieFab Nanofabrication Facility to explore unique and innovative fabrication methods for gamma-ray detecting microcalorimeters. This partnership fosters collaboration between experts at Sandia’s Microsystems Engineering, Science and Applications (MESA) Complex with colleagues at AggieFab to help tackle the unique challenges associated with the design and fabrication of a low-temperature, microfabricated, radiation detection system.”
Both Fellows will begin their research work with SNL this year. The National Laboratories Office is hoping to expand the GSS Fellows program to include several participants from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.