PhD student Austin Ready (Spokoyny lab) has been selected for the AFRL 2022 Space Scholars Program to work on the design, fabrication, characterization, and development of functional coatings and materials for space technology.
Austin is a third-year year graduate student in Professor Alex Spokoyny’s lab working on the synthesis and characterization of redox-active icosahedral boron clusters. This summer, he will work with mentor Dr. Thomas Peng at New Mexico’s Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to incorporate boron clusters into space-operable photovoltaic devices. At the AFRL, Austin will be working at the interface of chemical synthesis and materials design to achieve these goals. His AFRL internship will be in-person for ten weeks in Albuquerque, beginning in June 2022.
The AFRL Space Scholars Program is geared towards giving students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) an opportunity to experience research in an Air Force laboratory and to work on projects directly related to promoting national security.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
