David Ennis, Advisor
“Curt has been working with us since the summer of 2015, on a collaboration with the DIII-D tokamak national fusion facility in San Diego, California. Our DOE-funded research investigates erosion of plasma facing components (PFCs). The work that Curt has performed has placed Auburn at the forefront of this challenging problem. Curt has proven to be an exceptional researcher and has developed a wide set of skills. In many ways he is of similar caliber to a very talented postdoc. Curt was primarily given the task to work on the experimental part of the project. However Curt has proven himself to be a very capable at computational tasks as well.” - David Ennis and Stuart Loch

Daniel Warner, Advisor
“Over the past 4.5 years I have been continually impressed with Josh’s motivation, leadership, and productivity. He has been a crucial part of my lab, from guiding research projects, to assisting other graduate students with their work, to mentoring undergraduate students. Josh has outstanding critical thinking skills, he is very motivated and an extremely hard worker, and he has already successfully executed most of his proposed Ph.D. research. Indeed, he has completed nearly all of his studies, some of which are already published. Josh has continually been ahead of schedule during his tenure as a Ph.D. student - he past his comprehensive exams with no reservations, and he has published 7 lead-author papers from his research in my lab already (after just 4.5 years at Auburn University). He also coauthored 5 papers from side projects, has three additional papers that are in review, and several others in the works. Josh has been successful at securing small grants to support some of his research, and he was recently awarded a highly competitive graduate fellowship from the Alabama EPSCoR. He has also given several presentations at scientific conferences, which were very well received by other experts in his field (winning two competitions for best student oral presentation). In fact, he has been invited to three special symposia at national and international conferences on various topics related to his research. He has also been invited to contribute to special journal issues on topics related to his research. Josh has clearly demonstrated an ability to follow his work through to completion, and he is already recognized among professionals in his field.”

Anne Gorden, Advisor
“Research programs in my group bridge organic synthesis and inorganic chemistry, working with coordination chemistry for environmental applications or new catalysts. Because of this, I frequently have graduate students that are inorganic students interested in coordination chemistry as well as addition organic or synthetic methods focused students. We have been looking at ways to take advantage of the carbene and heterocycles chemistry as a probe for characterizing the bonding of the 5f orbitals in actinides and compart them to those bonding modes found in transition elements. This will allow us to do donor-acceptor characterizations and thing about modes of bonding in the 5f elements. It has the potential to be very exciting in explaining fundamental science with actinide and covalent or “covalent-like” bonds. It is in working on this project that ulie has really developed her independence as a scientist combining organic synthesis and fundamental inorganic chemistry. Julie has had an excellent opportunity to learn about techniques in each of these areas. Much of her time has been spend on X-ray diffraction of small molecules as solids, but also electrochemistry, NMR, IR, UV-Vis, and solid-state UV-Vis microscopy. This is an unusual area of work in part because of the difficulties in working with the radioactive actinides, but has allowed us to compare chemistries and learn more about fundamental actinide chemistry and bonding interactions. This is not nearly as well defined or explored as it is in the case of first row transition metals, and may allow us to support computational findings reported in other groups earlier.”

T. Y. Tam / Ming Liao, Advisor
“Ms. Gan’s major field is linear algebra. Her Ph.D. advisor Dr. T.Y. Tam moved to another university two years ago and continued to advise her, but asked me to be her co-advisor. I happily accepted this role. It has been very pleasant to work with Ms. Gan. She is a serious and intelligent student, a good and observant listener, and is able to catch up new things quickly. Dr. Tam gave her a few papers to read on the subject of differential geometry on matrix groups and the application to more efficient algorithms. At first Ms. Gan was not quite prepared for this new direction as her background in differential geometry at the time was minimal, but she quickly learnt the subject, in about three or four months, she began to write the first part of her thesis in which she took a critical look at the results in these papers and presented a more streamlined and unified approach.”

Tonia Schwartz, Mentor
“I have been very impressed with Milica’s excitement and passion to be involved in research. From working with her, it is clear that she is highly intelligent, motivated, organized, and responsible; as such she has been an integral part of many projects in the lab over the past three years. Her first semester with my research group, Milica was trained in animal care (lizards) and data collection techniques. She quickly picked up protocols, was consistent in her high-quality work, exhibited attention for detail, and took pride in her work – ideal qualities in a science student. Because of her performance, she transitioned to more detailed laboratory-based research working with a Ph.D. student mentor, Amanda Clark, learning reptile cell culture techniques and troubleshooting challenges of working in non-model systems. In May 2018, Milica accompanied me to do conservation-related field work for two weeks in California, where our team catching and measuring snakes and lizards, and processing blood and fecal samples for genetic and hormone analyses. Everything about this experience was new for Milica, from the tent camping to the catching of wild snakes. Although hesitant at first, she took it all in stride and was in good spirits the whole time! This exemplifies her ‘let’s do it’ attitude, desire for knowledge and new experiences, and her collaborative spirit.”

Scott Santos
“Dr. Hood has established and maintained a research program at Auburn University that should be considered extremely impressive. Specifically, she has been highly prolific, publishing >50 peer-reviewed articles (including multiple ones with undergraduate authors) and book chapters since starting at Auburn University in 2007 and ~60 manuscripts over her career. Many of these manuscripts have been published in medium- to top-tier international journals. Importantly, many of these works have been recognized as noteworthy and impactful by the scientific community, as evident by Dr. Hood having 5-year and overall h-indices of 12 and 16, respectively (values taken from Google Scholar).”