Highlight
IGERT Trainee Tracey Wellington Combines Interests in Magnetic Molecules, Physics Education and Outreach
Structure of prussian blue analog
Achievement/Results
Tracey Wellington is a graduate student at Texas A&M University, and a Trainee in the interdisciplinary graduate program “New Mathematical Tools for Next Generation Materials,” funded by the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. The program draws upon cutting-edge research in materials science and computational methodology at Texas A&M in a partnership between the interdisciplinary Materials Science and Engineering program and the Mathematics Department. Tracey has been pursuing research with Professors Winfried Teizer (Physics Department) and Kim Dunbar (Chemistry Department). She will travel to Amsterdam in August 2008 to present a paper on her work entitled, “Electronic Transport studies on the Magnetic Center of the Prussian Blue Analog FeII-CrIII” at the 25th International Conference on Low Temperature Physics. The upper figure shows the material under study, with magnetic atoms (blue and green spheres) interconnected by electrically conducting pathways. Tracey is, in turn, actively involved in efforts to enhance the graduate education process. Currently serving as Member-at-Large in the American Physical Society’s Forum on Graduate Student Affairs, Tracey was one of two graduate students invited to the conference “Graduate Education in Physics: Which Way Forward?” in Maryland in January 2008, where she provided a graduate student viewpoint on the development of graduate education in physics. Tracey co-authored the student summary paper for the conference. Tracey plans to pursue physics education research as a career, and she is particularly interested in the role of outreach and hands-on activities in the learning process. This interest dates to her own research experiences as an undergraduate, and she has carried this forward by working with other IGERT-program trainees in organizing hands-on activities for school children; the lower picture shows Tracey (at left) with IGERT trainees Anil Nandyala and Lauren Ferguson at the 2008 Physics Fest, Physics Fest, where several thousand children and parents participated. Tracey has also assumed a leading role in several organizations on campus. Among these, she serves as Director of the University-wide Student Research Week (the largest such program in the US), and serves as board member of the Texas A&M chapter of Women in Science and Engineering, which sponsors a Science Bowl and Science Olympiad each year. As recognition of her dedicated service in these activities, Tracey was awarded the 2007 Texas A&M Graduate Student Council Guseman Award for outstanding service. As a further recognition, her student colleagues at Texas A&M have voted her as President of the 2008-9 Graduate Student Council.
Address Goals
Tracey Wellington’s participation in the IGERT program at Texas A&M has given her the opportunity to work with groups in several departments in her molecular magnet research, giving her a mathematical modeling perspective as well as an experimental outlook on the problem. In particular, her work has brought together the groups of Dunbar and Teizer for the study of molecular magnet-based materials, which may represent the next generation for miniaturization in magnetic data storage, a technology of great commercial significance to the US. The Texas A&M group has been designing more stable materials with electrical conduction pathways to address the magnetization state directly, which may represent a revolutionary way to address this application. The interdisciplinary curriculum developed for this program has also included coursework in wide-ranging fields including Materials Science, Mathematics, and Business, which has given Tracey a unique perspective on graduate education. The interdisciplinary curriculum of this program as well as the broad perspective provided by the research experiences will help to cultivate the type of workforce needed to tackle next-generation problems in science and technology. Tracey’s interdisciplinary research thus addresses a potentially transformative technology for magnetic storage commercial applications, and she will carry her interdisciplinary educational experiences forward in her own career as she works to develop transformative student learning experiences and expand scientific literacy.
