2023 APS Far West Section Meeting
Members of the Society of Physics Students (SPS) and Women in Physics (WiP) SCU on-campus organizations attended the American Physical Society's 2023 Far West Section Meeting on Friday Oct. 6. The meeting was held on the campus of UC San Diego, and was attended by physics graduates and undergraduates from across California, Nevada, and Hawaii. SCU students presented their research to hundreds of physicists, spanning the topics of astrophysics, material science, optics, and biophysics.
Big congratulations go to Physics majors Riley Carpenter ’25 (Engineering Physics) and Isa Camacho ’26 (Engineering Physics) for their award-winning research presentations! Riley won 2nd place for the Steven Chu Undergraduate Research Award (experimental) for his presentation: "Low-temperature circuit component characterization and nanofabrication process tuning for cryogenic dark matter detectors”, based on summer research with Professor Betty Young. Isa Camacho won 1st place for the Helen Quinn Award for Undergraduate Research (theory) for her presentation: “Testing Fluorescent Protein Sequence Entropy for Correlation with Protein Properties”, based on summer research done with Shyam Gajavelli (University of Florida). There were many excellent talks at the conference, making these awards all the more impressive. Congratulations, Isa and Riley!
L-R: Serena Thompson '25, Riley Carpenter '25, Leyang Ding '24, Leo Illing '25, Joey Vollert '25, Renee Chapla '26, Ariana Riofrio '26, Isa Camacho '26, Ivar Rydstrom '24.