Carissa Goldstein Awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

 

Carissa Goldstein, a second year graduate student in the in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University, was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). As one of the original fellowship programs, the NSF GRF program has a long track record of creating life long leaders in science and engineering. Previous fellows include Steven Chu (U. S. Secretary of Energy), Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google), 30 Nobel Prize winners, and 440 members in the National Academy of Sciences. Understandably, this is a highly selective program. In 2011, 2,000 applicants were selected out of a pool of 12,000 submissions. Carissa is now in very distinguished company and we congratulate her on this well deserved award.

Over the past two years in the Irving research group, Carissa has developed an expertise in the use of first principles simulations to predict properties of buried inorganic interfaces. Her proposed research aims to develop new active functional materials through an understanding of oxygen transport through buried heterogenous interfaces. To accomplish this, Carissa will build on her atomistic simulation experience and extend her skill set to simulation of microstructural level phenomena through collaboration with world leaders in continuum transport simulation in France. Ultimately, Carissa hopes the understanding gained from this work will lead to novel functional interfaces with tunable properties and extended lifetimes. Furthermore, Carissa hopes to excite the next generation of scientist and engineer through her continued work with Women in Science and Engineering at NCSU.