Materials Science Demonstration and Presentation at the Spence School

As part of a recent outreach effort, Professor Katayun Barmak (Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University) and graduate student Matthew Patrick (Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University) visited The Spence School, a local all-girls high school, to give a talk during their Research Scientist program.

This program gives these budding scientists a chance to conduct their own research and provides them the opportunity to connect with active researchers to learn about cutting edge work across a wide variety of disciplines. The visitors began by introducing the fundamentals of their field, Materials Science and Engineering, through the lens of ever developing microelectronics technology, showcasing example devices from some of the earliest magnetic storage media, to once-revolutionary “floppy” disks, to modern thin-film hard-drives. Hands on demonstrations brought defects, deformation mechanisms, and solid-solid phase transformations to life, through the dramatically different mechanical properties of paper clips and shape memory wires. Barmak and Patrick concluded with a presentation of their latest research results on automated grain boundary detection, a long-standing problem finally solved using a modern machine learning approach, demonstrating to these young women that while research is often a decades-long process, with enough patience and persistence, old problems can be solved with new tools if only you continue to try. Finally, the class participated in a Q&A, where Professor Barmak shared some advice about building a fruitful and fulfilling career as a researcher and as a scientist.