Two undergraduate students affiliated with MSE recently received NSF Graduate Research Fellowships: Will Millsaps and Miti Shah, both members of the Hovden lab.

The NSF GRFP is a five-year fellowship meant to assist graduate students in STEM. The prestigious fellowship includes a three-year stipend and access to NSF-supported professional development opportunities.

Remarkably, over the past six and a half years, Hovden has had six NSF-eligible undergraduates work in his lab and all six have earned NSF Fellowships: Jacob Pietryga (now pursuing a Ph.D. at Northwestern), Noah Schnitzer (Cornell), Reed Yalisove (Berkeley), Emily Rennich (Stanford), and now Millsaps and Shah (both of whom are heading to Stanford next year).

According to Hovden, one secret to his students' success is the expectation that they take on graduate student-level responsibilities, including helping lead projects. "We rely on the undergraduates for our research to be successful," said Hovden, who says he works daily with each of his mentees. "They take on challenging problems from theory, computation, to experiment. Michigan students are the best in the world, and I find you can give them the hardest problems to solve."   

With the goal of making science accessible, Will Millsaps, a 2024 graduate in engineering physics, has worked specifically with electron tomography, a technique that allows researchers to retrieve the complete 3D structure of nanoparticles, revealing information that is otherwise hidden in 2D “projection” images.

"I try to improve the technique side of electron tomography by applying compressed sensing terms and linking imaging modalities," Millsaps explained. "Additionally, I measure and dampen vibrations to image atoms at liquid helium temperatures in the scanning transmission electron microscope. Because trying to keep atoms still while they are coupled to boiling helium is quite challenging, we use geophones and accelerometers to measure the vibrational spectrum of our equipment and target it with creative solutions."

In addition, Millsaps has helped create ronchigram.com, a free and intuitive tool that teaches new microscopists the art of aberration correction. He has also been a part of the Atlas of Fourier Transforms project, which quickly builds up intuition for Fourier space and diffraction using a comprehensive book and an interactive diffraction kit that he designed and produced at U-M's Lurie Nanofabrication Facility.

Miti Shah is a senior pursuing a double major in Electrical Engineering and Engineering Physics. Her research focus has been on using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to study phase transitions in vanadium diselenide, quantify thermal losses in cryo-TEM holders, and analyze vibrational data to improve imaging conditions—particularly for holders operating at liquid helium temperatures. At the same time, she was the primary author of the Atlas of Fourier Transforms, a book that guides scientists of all backgrounds in the art of moving between real space and Fourier space. For this project, she simulated hundreds of patterns and gained first-hand experience in academic self-publishing. 

"This comprehensive library of Fourier transform pairs covers a range of biological and inorganic structures and helps build intuition between real and reciprocal space," said Shah. "Currently, the Atlas is in the hands of hundreds of scientists and enthusiasts in more than 15 countries."

Congratulations to Will, Miti, and Robert!