“Keep Looking” Nicky Subler ’16 placed first in the third annual repurposed paper art contest of The Claremont Colleges Library. She describes her creation: “What I made is a paper roller coaster, a vaulted pathway, essentially, for beads. I used paper strips from the book, some double-sided tape and some glue. I’ve seen/helped make them in large scale before, and they’ve always partly entertained and partly awed me with the variety of their construction. I started it for fun and ended up finishing it for this contest—the paper came from a repurposed book called Meta Math! by Gregory Chaitin, which had a lot of thought-provoking or beautiful or strange quotes that I worked into the construction of the coaster. That’s also why it’s called “Keep Looking”—I just want you to keep searching for all those little details, like the Celtic knot design that appears from above or the questions that follow the beads’ path. I also just want you to play with it— because yes, it actually works. Did you think I’d make one that didn’t?”
[The judges] seemed so surprised that engineering and art could mix, but I don’t think it’s surprising at all. It’s everywhere. —Nicky Subler ’16
Show and Tell Chemistry students Sejal Shah ’14 and Anastasia Patterson ’14 earned Best Poster awards at the spring Materials Research Society national meeting in San Francisco. Their poster illustrates fundamental studies on easily manufactured, low-cost alternatives to silicon solar cells. Shah and Patterson were in Symposium B, Organic and Inorganic Materials for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells. Their faculty advisor is Hal Van Ryswyk, professor of chemistry and department chair. “Sejal and Anastasia were clearly the center of attention at the poster session, fielding questions on both their own work and the overall arc of the project,” says Van Ryswyk. Co-authors on the research are Emily Ross ’14, Mo Zhao ’16, Amy Konsza ’12, Samantha Fisher ’12, Laura Collins ’11, Chiara Giammanco ’10, Mark Hendricks ’10, Ha Seong Kim ’11, Daniel O’Neil ’11, Trevor McQueen ’09, Nancy Eisenmenger ’09 and Ryan Pakula ’09. Van Ryswyk lauds Shah for “a breadth and depth of experience that is uncommon in an undergraduate researcher,” and notes that Patterson, a more recent addition to the project team, has created “beautiful zinc oxide nanotubes that previously required multiple trips to the Stanford Nanofabrication Laboratory to produce.” “It’s only when they get outside of Harvey Mudd that they see just what they have accomplished,” says Van Ryswyk. Along with Patterson and Shah, Mudd chemistry students Sara Tweedy ’14, Marie Kirkegaard ’15 and Christian Stevens ’14 have all garnered national awards at scientific conventions during the academic year.
SUMMER 2014
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