April 2, 2023 Congratulations to Anirudh Hari for being selected for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Anirudh has been with the Wicks Lab since February 2020, and graduated with a BS in Physics with honors from Johns Hopkins in May 2022. Since then, he has continued his work with the Wicks Lab, presenting at multiple...

December 28, 2022 Anirudh Hari, who completed his BS in Physics in May 2022, has published his work titled “High pressure phase transition and strength estimate in polycrystalline alumina during laser-driven shock compression” in Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. The paper, co-first-authored by Wicks Lab high school student Rohit Hari, was published as part of...

March 14, 2022 Congratulations to graduate student Tyler Perez for being awarded an Outstanding Student Presentation Award (OSPA) for his presentation at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2021 Fall Meeting! OSPAs are awarded to promote, recognize and reward students for quality research in the geophysical sciences. Tyler’s presentation was titled “Measuring the Thermal Conductivity of Iron at Extreme...

August 23, 2022 Dr. Vinay Rastogi, a postdoctoral scholar at the Wicks Lab, has published his work titled “Femtosecond diffraction studies of the sodium chloride phase diagram under laser shock compression” in the Journal of Applied Physics. The study describes in situ X-ray diffraction measurements of sodium chloride taken during shock compression and subsequent pressure...

August 16, 2022 Dr. Melissa Sims, an NSF postdoctoral scholar in the Wicks Lab, published her work on phase transitions in shock-compressed copper in the Journal of Applied Physics. Her paper, titled “Experimental and theoretical examination of shock-compressed copper through the fcc to bcc to melt phase transitions,” was selected as an Editor’s Pick article....

Dr. Sims gave a talk on her work studying Plagioclase and MgO using multiple compression regimes to the AGU virtual meeting this December. There are significant kinetics questions arising when connecting short time scales of experiments to the environment of planetary interiors we seek to understand. With an eye to these questions, she discussed the...

This fall, Wicks Lab welcomes Yijing Li as graduate student. The following is a short interview with our newest member. Welcome, Gin! Q: Where did you study? What was your favorite class? A: I studied at UC Santa Barbara. My favorite class was the Mineralogy and Optical Mineralogy class. Q: What drew you to mineral...

The Wicks Lab has a new postdoc opportunity in modeling. Don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions: [email protected].

Former research assistant Junellie Gonzalez Quiles returns to Wicks Lab this August as a graduate student, and has been awarded a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to pursue her PhD. Junellie is bridging the gap among astronomers, planetary scientists, and geoscientists, in the emerging field of exogeoscience. Exogeoscience considers geological processes reflected in exoplanets’ atmospheres, in...

Wicks Lab graduate student Tyler Perez will speak at the 2020 Consortium for Material Properties Research in the Earth Science (COMPRES) annual meeting, which will be held virtually on August 14. He’ll present on his experimental work to determine the thermal conductivity of iron at high pressures, which is necessary to develop heat transport models...