Ms. Bernadette Cladek, a doctoral student in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville received the Chung Soo Yoo award for the Best Graduate Student Poster at the 2019 Pittsburgh Diffraction Conference. Bernadette's’s research focuses on understanding the structure of mixed methane/carbon dioxide hydrates through neutron scattering. Her research advisor is Prof. Claudia Rawn. Bernadette has spent the past year at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on a DOE Graduate Student Fellowship under the tutelage of Dr. Matt Tucker. There she has pushed the limits of the information that methodical modeling (involving both classical molecular dynamics and reverse Monte Carlo) can extract from the entirety of the total scattering data available from experiments conducted with the NOMAD beamline. Her research establishes fundamental structural and thermodynamic insights necessary for the successful realization of methane hydrates (with carbon dioxide replacement) as a carbon-neutral energy source.

More information on the Chung Soo Yoo Award

More photos on the Keffer research group site.