She received the Neville B. Smith Student Poster Prize
Natalie Larson, a current ALS doctoral fellow from UC Santa Barbara, won the first prize Neville B. Smith Student Poster Award at the 2017 ALS User Meeting. Larson’s winning poster—”In-situ x-ray computed tomography of defect evolution during polymer impregnation and pyrolysis processing of ceramic matrix composites”—featured the first two big in situ experiments she performed at Beamline 8.3.2.
Larson has been an ALS user since 2014 and became a doctoral fellow in 2016. She’ll continue at the ALS for about another year through a National Science Foundation fellowship that will see her through the end of her PhD. The primary focus of her work is developing high-temperature ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) for more efficient jet engines. Larson works with Beamline Scientists Dula Parkinson and Alastair MacDowell and Project Scientist Harold Barnard on developing experiments for in situ x-ray computed tomography experiments to observe 3D real-time defect formation in CMCs.