SAS ATOMIC STUDENT SECTION AWARD

2024 Award Recipients

Kyle Latty recently finished his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering at the University of Florida under the mentorship of Prof. Kyle C. Hartig in the Optical Science and Nonproliferation Group, joining as an undergraduate student in 2017. His research focuses on advancing optical sensing techniques used to detect trace quantities of radiological aerosols for applications relevant to national defense. Kyle was awarded the Department of Defense Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) fellowship in 2020 and has since been working with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) through his academic research and summer internships. His current effort focuses on using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to characterize single actinide particles lifted from limited sample quantities using optical trapping in air.

Paula Menero Valdés recently finished her Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Oviedo (Spain) under the supervision of Profs. Rosario Pereiro and Beatriz Fernández. She also received her B.Sc. in Chemistry (2019) and M.Sc. in Analytical Chemistry (2020) by the same university, and for her successful B.Sc. studies she was awarded the scholarship “Oviedo Siembra Talento”. Her research activities started as an undergraduate student with a “Collaboration scholarship” at the Physical and Analytical Chemistry Department of the University of Oviedo working on the synthesis of metal nanolabels for protein determination by ICP-MS. Later, she was awarded the competitive FPU grant by the Spanish Education Ministry to pursue her doctoral studies. As part of her PhD in 2022 she did a short research stage at BAM Division 1.1 under the supervision of PhD. Björn Meermann. Her research focuses on the determination of proteins related to neurodegeneration at single cell level using laser ablation ICP-MS and single cell ICP-MS.

Lhiam Paton is an environmentally focused analytical chemist who completed is undergraduate studies (MChem) at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and his PhD at the University of Graz, Austria. Throughout his PhD, under the supervision of Prof. Jörg Feldmann and in collaboration with partners in the oil and gas industry, Lhiam focused on mercury (Hg) contamination and transformation in marine environments through the application of ICP-MS-based strategies in two broad areas of Hg research. Those being the investigation of potential Hg contamination of the ocean from oil and gas decommissioning; and Hg nanoparticle formation either from oil and gas processes or as a result of methylmercury detoxification in cetaceans.

Dr. Maximilian Horstmann received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Münster in Germany. During his Master studies he focused his research on analytical chemistry, which he intensified in 2019 during a research stay with Prof. Philip Doble and Dr. David Clases in Australia at the University of Technology Sydney. After joining the group of Prof. Uwe Karst at the University of Münster for his master thesis in 2020, he continued his research in analytical chemistry with a PhD, which he received this year. His thesis focuses on hyphenated mass spectrometric techniques to improve ultra-trace detection of metal contaminants in complex aqueous samples.

2023 Award Recipient – Catharina Erbacher

Catharina Erbacher is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Analytical Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Uwe Karst at the University of Münster, Germany. She also obtained her B.Sc. (2018) and M.Sc. (2020) at the University of Münster and was honored with a graduation award for her successful M.Sc. studies by the Analytical Chemistry Division of the German Chemical Society. During her Master’s program, she joined the group of Prof. Dr. Risto Kostiainen at the University of Helsinki for a research internship. There, she focused on targeted metabolomics and proteomics to investigate the combination of tyrosine oxidation and phosphorylation. For her Master’s thesis, she became a member of Prof. Karst’s group, focusing on the development of an IC-ICP-MS method for speciation analysis of brominated nucleosides. The focus of her Ph.D. lies on the investigation of metal-protein-interactions using a complementary setup, comprising LC-ESI-TIMS-MS and LC-ICP-MS.

2023 Award Recipient –Cristina Mendez-Lopez

Cristina Mendez-Lopez is a 4th year Ph.D. student working on Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) at the Spectroscopy, Lasers and Plasmas Research Group (GELP) led by Profs. Nerea Bordel and Jorge Pisonero at the University of Oviedo. My experience in LIBS dates back to my undergraduate years, when I pursued my B.Sc. Thesis (Physics, 2018) on the subject of the effects of nebulization on laser-induced plasmas under supervision of Prof. Nerea Bordel. Afterwards, the Research Group gave me the opportunity to carry out my M.Sc. Thesis (Analytical and Bioanalytical Sciences, 2019) on the development of a double-pulse LIBS experimental set-up, from scratch, with the newly acquired femtosecond and nanosecond lasers. My Ph.D. Thesis continues the research in both fields of LIBS, having developed a methodology for liquid sample analysis based on nebulization (patent pending) and currently working on the thorough characterization of double-pulse LIBS experimental parameters, with special focus on the spatio-temporal variables.