PhD candidate Bernadette Cladek received the Chung Soo Yoo award for the Best Graduate Student Poster at the 2019 Pittsburgh Diffraction Conference. Cladek’s research focuses on the understanding the structure of mixed methane/carbon dioxide hydrates through neutron scattering. Her research advisor is Prof. Claudia Rawn. Cladek has spent the past year at the Spallation Neutron Source on a Department of Energy Graduate Student Fellowship under the tutelage of 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.

Read more about the Chung Soo Yoo Award.