Campus Currents

Physics Major Conducts NSF Research

Stephanie Hatten, junior physics major, began reading books on quantum mechanics before taking any physics classes at Walla Walla College. “The ideas were just so out there,” she says, “Quantum mechanics really interest me.” She was so interested that she chose physics as her major. Looking for an opportunity to do undergraduate research, she signed on for a program with the National Science Foundation and got the experience she was looking for.

Through the Research Experience for Undergraduates program, she worked in an optics laboratory at North Carolina State University, where research was being conducted in near field scanning optical microscopy. She worked with a researcher who was using a microscope to examine plant cells.

The fiber optic tip of the microscope needed to be coated with a substance to make it hydrophobic, so that water and cellular tissue would not stick to it and destroy the cell. She helped to test how well the substance coated and cleaned off.

All undergraduate researchers participated in a final presentation for which they made posters about their work. Though her lab flooded two weeks before the project was due, causing her to lose all her data, Stephanie won an award for the best poster.

Stephanie plans to go to graduate school and take an interdisciplinary program that combines physics with the philosophical aspects behind the science. “It helped me realize that grad school isn’t so scary, and I don’t have to be a genius to do what I think is really interesting,” she says of her experience, “It made me more confident about going after my goals.” W

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