10 Questions! with MSE Senior Wyeth Haddock

Welcome to the May episode of 10 Questions! My guest this month is Wyeth Haddock, a senior Materials Science and Engineering student with an interest in material structure and behavior. Wyeth has filled many roles throughout his undergraduate journey. In the classroom, he has mentored students as a teaching assistant in the classroom and lab for the past four semesters. Outside of the classroom, he serves as a Student Representative on the ASM International Board of Trustees, is the president of the Club Running team, and serves as a campus tour guide at the Lodewick Visitors Center.

His research focuses on the connection between structure and properties in advanced alloy systems. Through his University Scholar project at UConn and NSF REU at UC Berkeley and the National Center for Electron Microscopy, Wyeth has studied how atomic arrangement influences the way materials behave. These experiences shaped his interest in making materials science easier to understand, leading him to co-author "Materials Matter", an introductory book designed to bring materials science to a broader audience. Through research, teaching, outreach, and conference presentations (including a win at the Big East Research Symposium), Wyeth has built his undergraduate career around the core idea: materials do in fact matter.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Welcome to May's episode of Ten Questions with Dean Berke. Today's guest is helping make one of engineering's most important and maybe least understood fields more accessible to the next generation. Wyeth Haddock is a Yukon student and university scholar whose work spans both cutting-edge material science research and engineering education outreach. This year, Wyath co-authored a 173-page book called Materials Matter alongside Professor Sokwu Li, designed to introduce high school and first-year college students to the world of material science and engineering. At the same time, he's conducting advanced research on a newly discovered family of intermetallic materials with the potential to perform in extreme environments, work that could have implications for high-temperature structural applications and future technologies. Whether he's explaining engineering concepts to new learners or contributing to research that head it toward publication, Wyath represents a powerful combination of curiosity, communication, and innovation. Today we'll talk about what it means to make science accessible, the excitement of discovering something entirely new, and why outreach matters just as much as research. All right, welcome to the May episode of Ten Questions. And my guest today is senior material science and engineering student Wyeth Haddock. Wyeth, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Excited to be here. Awesome. Thanks for joining me today. So we talked a little bit a couple of weeks ago during commencement time, and you were talking about the fact that you had co-authored a textbook. So you recently co-authored a book called Materials Matter. And so tell us how you got the opportunity as an undergraduate to write a book about material science for younger audiences.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Yeah, it's actually pretty awesome and kind of funny how I ended up stumbling into this situation. So I've been doing research with, you know, a fabulous professor of material science and engineering, Dr. Seku Lee, for, you know, the past year and a half or so, two years. And, you know, it's been a great experience. This past summer, I was I stuck around on campus for a little while to hang out. You know, I was doing some work, I was getting some stuff done in the lab for my research project, we'll talk about a little bit later. And I was chatting with Dr. Lee about, you know, what are what are some cool things that I can do this summer because I'm going to be away and want to get more involved, like want to get more involved, especially as I'm going through the graduate school application process. And so I was very interested in, you know, maybe going and doing some computational research project or helping out with some data analysis that he was doing or doing some literature, literature review for some paper. Uh, but he ended up presenting me with a much more interesting option, and that was writing a book. Pretty much what had happened is uh two years before, while he had been on sabbatical, he had sort of gone and written some some semblance of a book uh that he had initially published that was sort of like an introduction to material science and engineering textbook, but he was very emphatic about the fact that, you know, this was, you know, it was like 120, 130 pages. It, you know, he is not a native English speaker, and so a lot of the the ways that he had written, he didn't necessarily think would apply well to, you know, English speaking and reading audiences. And so he was very interested in sort of tuning the book to sort of meet meet this audience because he hadn't necessarily seen the performance from the book that he had wanted. And I was like, he was like, You want to help out? And I was like, sure. And so we sat down, we talked about how you know he wanted me to go through and sort of correct a lot of the you know the inconsistencies, make the book slightly more, you know, applicable to this sort of younger audience that he was going for, because as I've gone through and read it the first time, I definitely noticed that it wasn't necessarily the best for that target audience, uh, as well as going and add a bunch of chapters. So I added quite a few chapters, I added a lot of sections, I added, you know, DIY experiments, and I added, you know, an explanation of you know the transmission electron microscopy, which I was working on at the same time. And so uh, you know, a lot of cool opportunities that he was very interested in me sort of throwing in there. And he also gave me a lot of flexibility to define and say, hey, what are the things that you'd be interested in adding to this book? And what do you think it needs, and how do you think it needs analogies? And so I effectively did like a whole rewriting of the book. I started early in the summer and was pretty consistently working on it. You know, at most nights I would go down to like a the cafe that was near where I was staying over the summer and I'd get a hot chocolate and I'd sit and I'd work through the book, or you know, during weekend days when I didn't have stuff going on with friends, I'd go to the you know, the student union and I'd I'd sit down and I'd get a lot of work done. And so it was just sort of a continuous progression throughout the summer of these are things that need to be fixed, these are things that you know I want to add, how can I go in and how can I do that? How can I you know make this more applicable? And so it was also a consistent read through of what's good, what's bad, how can I fix this, how can I update this, and ended up sort of effectively by the end of the summer sending a draft back to Dr. Lee that he could look at, and then he looked through that and he sent it back to me, and then I looked at that, sent it back to him, he sent it back to me. We were sort of you know continuously iterating on what we had until in you know early December, uh he was like, you know, I think I think we're near a publishable state, and I was like, Oh, let's try to do this soon. I have my grant applications too. And uh he ended up, you know, getting it published around late December, near the actually, I think it was like the day before December 30th, the day before uh New Year's Eve, and it was just super exciting because it was like the culmination of all the work that I had been doing, and we ended up getting this book that I could like tell my mom to go and order on Amazon, which he thought was really awesome.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

That is fun, that is really fun. Um, so material science, right, it's it's a fairly small major here, right? It it grows as students learn about it, but material science isn't a field that a lot of high school students know much about. And so you mentioned trying to make it more accessible. So, what are some of the everyday examples you used in the book to help understand, uh help people understand why materials really do matter? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

And the the most important thing to making it accessible is making it meaningful. Like with a lot of these other engineering fields, say mechanical engineering or civil engineering, kids learn about those at a very young age. Like you drive over a bridge and you're like, oh, you know, your parents like, oh, a civil engineer helped it.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

Why in an airplane, drive a car with a colour? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Yeah, mechanical engineer did that. Even like biomedical engineering, you know, you talk to your grandma about the new hip implant she got, and she's like, you know, biomedical engineering. And so they're very accessible. And the issue with material science and engineering is that it's not that accessible. Though all the materials used to make the car and make the airplane and make the implant and develop the structural materials for the bridge, those all you know, go back to material science and engineering and wouldn't be possible without material science and engineering. And so, really, like immediately in the book, we go and we try to emphasize this. And the best way to do that is by like providing images, right? And so, my favorite example that was that was used, and this was really one that was you know established by Dr. Lee, uh, is this idea of like Iron Man's armor, right? You know, we have this really strong but also really lightweight material uh that's you know being used, and obviously this is a fictional scenario, right? But it's something where if we want to go and we ever want to design a suit of armor comparable to what Iron Man has, you need light materials and you need very strong materials and you need these materials that exhibit all these properties. And so it's very much an introductory way to go and explain that, oh, you know, you have seen material science and engineering in.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

There's some pop culture examples.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Exactly, yeah. So there's some pop culture examples, but I will also mention, you know, that's really establishing why material science is important. Right. As you're going through and you're discussing these are the you know, concepts, you have to make them understandable. And so a few of my favorites I really like to highlight is the idea of paperclip fatigue, and fatigue is that phenomenon in materials, whereas you repeatedly load it, eventually, you know, in some instances it fails, and some instances it doesn't. A lot of students probably have experience sitting there bending paper clips at their desks. Yes, exactly, exactly. So that's what you like. We show that in the book. We're like, oh, if you can find a paperclip right now, go bend it, bend it back, bend it back, bend it back, and see how many times it fails. And if you bend it less, how many cycles does it take until it fails? And it's just sort of explaining that concept. Another one of my favorites that I actually learned from um Dr. Goberman, who is an adjunct professor in material science and engineering, comes and teaches failure analysis. Teaches failure analysis, yeah. Uh, and you know, when he was sort of doing some of those more introductory lectures, uh, we were chatting about this idea of like amorphous materials and rapid solidification of materials. And he had us all get up and go to the front of the room, and then he was like, Okay, I'm gonna give you 20 seconds to go back and find your seat. And so it gave us 20 seconds, we got back, we were in that ordered arrangement. He's like, I'm gonna give you three seconds to go back and find your seat. And we got back, and a couple people maybe were in the right spot, but a lot of us were very disordered, and that was sort of showing the formation of these amorphous glass-like structures, which was really cool. And so throwing in demos like that. I also mentioned earlier that I was very interested in adding in some DIY, do-it-yourself experiments. That's the last chapter of the book. And I'd come up with a couple different things, but we sort of narrowed it down to uh this bubble-reft experiment, which is really cool, where it's like you make a bunch of little orbees and then you push them around and you can observe like atoms. It's like you're simulating atoms moving, so you can very clearly see dislocations moving through the material, and you can very clearly see all these interesting phenomena, grain boundaries, all these really cool things. And so a lot of ways that we're going throughout the book, from those that might not necessarily be as transparent to those that are very transparent, like go do it yourself at home, yeah. That are really teaching people about this this field of material science and engineering that once again they don't really know about before.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Okay, very, very cool. Um, so writing a book of you know 150 uh 200 pages uh as a student is sort of no small feat. So, what was it like working with Dr. Lee and what did you learn about communicating technical ideas clearly? Kind of you just talked about a bit.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Yeah, absolutely. So I really like to harp on this idea of, like I just mentioned, you know, making these challenging concepts very fundamental, not even necessarily fundamental, but very much, you know, easily understandable to any audience. Because audience is something that's that's very important to consider. You know, you learn about this when you're taking your high school English class and you kind of think, oh, audience, you know, whatever. But as you go and you're you know preparing these pieces of scientific work, audience is something that is very, very important to consider. And you know, I I'd started writing the book throughout the beginning chunk of the summer, and then sort of, I think it was in late June, I went to this workshop on scientific communication. And at this workshop on scientific communication, I learned about this idea of you know, and commonly when you're trying to present these things, you think of sort of dumbing it down. Yeah. Uh but what they sort of highlighted to me was instead of thinking like framing it as dumbing it down, try to frame it as smartening it up. Okay. And so this is sort of taking something that, you know, may be very understandable to you, but you know, when I'm explaining these grain boundary phenomena and dislocations and you know, thermal conductivity, those are things that might not necessarily be as easily accessible to someone else. So don't like dumb it down and make it feel like you know you're explaining it to, say, uh a kid in elementary school. Try to smarten it up. How could I explain this to a kid in elementary school using the technical knowledge that I've learned throughout my you know material science and engineering career? Yeah. And so after I'd really I'd I'd gone through and probably made like half the changes and added some new stuff, I went back through and looked and I was like, have I tried to dumb this down or have I tried to really smarten it up and take these you know key concepts and make them very easily understandable to you know that that broader audience? And so this was very much a a key learning experience and something that you know takes time to do because you don't necessarily immediately know how to take these challenging concepts and make them easily understandable. But I feel like you know, throughout the course of the book and honestly throughout the course of my undergraduate engineering education, I've done a much better job of going through and trying to make these challenging concepts clear. And I can harp back to, you know, we just had senior design demonstration day explaining, you know, my engineering project to my mom, who is a you know first grade teacher. And you know, in the past I've gone and I've tried to explain stuff to her, and she has been like, has no idea what I'm talking about. And then in the case of you know, demo day, she came up and I, you know, I figured out a way to best explain this project to that audience, really, you know, smarten these things up. And I feel like I was able to sort of get through to her at the end. We were chatting at dinner, and she was like, I kind of understood what she did. I'm like, that's really the goal.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

So yeah, it's interesting because a lot of times, you know, when you work in something for a really long period of time, you forget what it was like to not know anything. And so, you know, being able to then reframe it and think about well, how would I explain this to me if I didn't know anything about this again? How would I might I do that? That's a really interesting approach. Absolutely. Um, so through that experience, right, you mentioned also discovering a passion for engineering outreach. So, why do you think outreach and education are so important in fields like material science? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

So obviously, you have that that first key critical component, which is that not a lot of people know about it, right? Like I mentioned, I did not know what material science and engineering was until I got to Yukon.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

Did you start as an MSE major?

SPEAKER_01 13:24

No, I actually I started as an undecided major, but I like to go, I I think back now, and it's just it's absolutely insane. I think back now to when I came here for Yukon Bound Day in April, my senior year of high school, and my dad and I were walking around and we had done like our tour and we'd gone to some sessions, and we thought there was a poster session over in you know the Wilbur Cross building. It was the Spring Frontiers. And we I was like, let's go check it out. And so we walked over, we walked in, and the first poster on the right uh was this very friendly guy, his name was Robert Williams. And Robert Williams was a senior who was studying material science and engineering, working on his university scholars research projects with Dr. Lee. So now I'm like, did I copy him? But we were doing different things, but you know, it was very much, you know, I talked to him and he explained me what material science and engineering was, and I was like, wow, that's so cool. You know, I went back to my high school and I was telling all them that, you know, I was thinking I might try to do something in material science and engineering, but you know, sort of when I got here, being undecided, I wanted to go and explore all the different things. I was very interested in chemical engineering, I was very interested in biomedical engineering. Uh, but what sort of lured me to the field of material science and engineering was another person who's been very pivotal pivotal throughout my journey, and that's Jack Kaz. He was a senior when I was a first year, and he was a material science and engineering student, and he took me into the brand new science one fielding and took me into the under undergraduate labs and showed me how he was using a blowtorch to melt down precious metals from a like a keyboard. Right. I was like, that's so awesome, that's so cool. And so pretty hands-on. Exactly, it was very hands-on. And these were things that were relatively unique to me, right? Not everyone gets the experience of going to a Frontiers poster session and meeting this guy who just so happens to be the president of your club, who's also, you know, one of the like the great material science and engineering students. And so it really sort of feels like I stumbled into this, but I thought it was just so amazing. And so I very much felt a drive and a passion to go and you know, teach it to other people. And so I have worked throughout the past, you know, three years to go and get more involved in this outreach. And the book is really, you know, the culmination of a lot of that effort. But I've done quite a few other cool things. I've, you know, the where I'm part of Material Advantage, and we do a lot of STEM demo days. So we bring students in to UConn. I've gone to a couple different schools, I've been to one different school in Connecticut to go and like do demonstrations. But I really love when we bring those students in and we just sort of get to explain to them what engineering is, and even if it's not necessarily you know complex material science, right? We're we're showing bending a paper clip and we're showing making slime and building towers and really introducing them to this field of engineering. And I just had such a such a great experience where you know I was going out and I was walking around with it was with a group of fifth graders, and I was like talking to them, I was like, What do you want to do when you grow up? And they were like, Well, I used to think I wanted to go to the NBA, but now I think I might want to be a scientist. I was like, that's awesome. And so it's it's the little things like that that really make you realize how impactful these you know tiny engineering outreach initiatives can be, and you know, how impactful is doing something larger, like like writing a book can be. And so I very much want to continue this throughout my career and go and make science accessible to broad audiences, especially people like me who you know come from a come from a small high school with graduated 55 students, where you know, we didn't even have like a great makerspace until my junior year, and so very much making it accessible to all of these audiences and all these crowds and showing them how cool it can be is definitely sort of grown to become a passion of mine.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Amazing. So, in addition to your book uh with Dr. Lee, you're also a university scholar. We had the honors medal ceremony uh last weekend, working in advanced materials research. So tell us a little bit about your work. What problems or what problem have you been trying to tackle in your work? Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

So my research surrounds this. I like to think of in material science, you have a couple different niches. You have like, you know, functional materials, you have, you know, extraction and metallurgy, you have like structural materials, you have light metals, you have all these sort of different subdivisions. And you know, my work's primarily concentrates in structural materials, and so this is like materials with improved mechanical performance. Uh, and so obviously, in all sorts of different applications, we're very interested in materials that can, you know, succeed in airplane engines and in developing, you know, materials for further space exploration, right? And so this is really the lofty goal and really the problem that a lot of people in this realm of structural material science and engineering are trying to solve. And obviously, with a lot of these, you know, fundamental engineering projects, I'm not necessarily going to go and create something that gets used to build a habitat on the backside of the moon, but I can uncover some unique phenomena and you know develop these interesting structures. And the sort of structure in class that I was most interested in was this idea of medium and high entropy alloys.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

And these are things that I learned about a decent bit, you know, during the you know, end of my sophomore year, and I looked at some papers during the summer as I was sort of prepping for University Scholars Project. But these are alloys where you have, you know, in most like steel, you have iron and you have carbon, and you mainly have iron, you have a little bit of carbon, you have some other alloying elements, you have some nickel, you have some chromium, and so on and so forth. But it's only real, there's one principal element, and so these MEAs or uh HEAs, you have multi-principle elements, you have multiple principal elements, and so it's like an even concentration of you know different uh elements. And so what's interesting about these is that you know they have been shown to exhibit great properties at you know room temperature, but also at extremes. And so that's like high temperatures, that's low temperatures, that's high strain rates, that's you know, very low strain rates, and so they've been shown to go and you know, depending on the material system, have these really cool and unique features. And this is all due to the way that they behave, right? The underlying structure, the deformation mechanisms. They do this cool thing called like nano-twinning, and so you're getting this really awesome phenomena. And you know, coming in as a junior in material science engineering, I didn't necessarily know a lot about all of that phenomena, but I'd read some papers and I'd seen some things, and I was very interested in going and developing a new material system in which we might be able to exploit some of these very interesting, you know, material properties that have been observed in similar material systems and go and you know, ideally later down the line develop ways that you know this could potentially be used in some you know critical applications. So it was very much like you know a an overall structural, you know, materials question, but then at the same time it was how can I go and you know uncover these phenomena and see how they behave in a brand new material system?

SPEAKER_00 19:34

Yeah, so you mentioned that your current work you mentioned that your current work um focused on this new family of things called intermetallic materials that have both high strength and improved ductility, something that you know historically has been hard to achieve in materials. So smartening it up for us, right? Why is that combination so important and and what real-world applications would you might uh might you put that into?

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Absolutely. And so you have you know this forever dream in material science and engineering that you want things that are bendy and strong. Bendy and strong, okay. And that's something you rarely get. Usually if you get something that's very strong, it's very brittle. It breaks easily. Usually if you get something that's bendy, it's not necessarily as strong, so it can't sustain as high of loads. And so, you know, for for a long time, you know, it's really been an overarching question in materials science and engineering for such a long time, but it was like, how can we get something that has both brands? For a long time, there's this class of materials, intermetallics, that showed that high strength, but in 2003 they figured out that a certain type had this, you know, high ductility too. And so it sort of had a nice, a nice mixture of both, and just sort of dive back into what exactly the project was looking to explore. Right? We have, you know, they they found these ternary or these binary B2s where you have this interesting B2 structure where you'd have copper at the corners, and then in some you'd have dysprosium at the center, and others you'd have yttrium at the center. Both of those are, you know, rare exotic elements that people don't usually hear about. You also don't really, yeah, you don't spend a lot of time learning about those. Dysprosium and yttrium, yeah, yeah. But you also had like one with silver, and so what I noticed is that you know, dysprosium and yttrium were completely you know soluble, and so then the question was like, can we form this, you know, unique structure? And I'll chat about that in just a minute. But you know, what was really interesting here was can I combine those entropic effects with you know what's been observed in the past, you know, inner metallic material systems and create this brand new structure that you know hasn't been commonly reported in the literature. And so it was very cool to go and sort of have that as you know our scientific background. And once again, the application for this is those things like you know, materials for components in deep space exploration. If we ever want to build a habitat on the backside of the moon where you're sustaining very, very cold temperatures, you need something that, once again, like I mentioned earlier, can possess those excellent properties at extremes. And you know, ideally a class like this might be able to do this.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Right, because I can imagine there you're also gonna have thermal cycling, so. So it's got to be strong, but it's also got to be able to flex and move.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

Exactly. Yeah. And so you have a lot of this, you know, these desired behaviors. And so you want something that, you know, has that great combination of both. Because you think about materials that are all around you right now. If you look around whatever room you're sitting in listening to this podcast, you're seeing all sorts of materials. You're probably seeing, you know, like we see right here, some steel in the window. And obviously that steel is very strong. It's going to be able to sustain event, but it might not necessarily be able to go and experience, you know, one of these, some of these extreme applications that you might be getting in, you know, aerospace applications, or if we're interested in, you know, designing, you know, materials for military systems where you have these, you know, potentially high impacts. And so it really is, you know, about getting that dream combination and then using this, hopefully, in real-world applications.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

And really thinking about designing it from a molecular scale.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Exactly, yeah. And it it all goes back to it goes back to the fundamentals of you know, how can we understand so understand the way the atoms are going to arrange? How can we use thermodynamics to predict this? You know, how can we go and take what we'd expect to see and couple that with our knowledge of you know the mechanical behavior, and then sort of go on from there and you know, see how this behaves in these extremes. And so, really, honestly, you know, I was reflecting back on this project and realizing that it really was a culmination of all the classes that I've taken throughout my undergrad, which is pretty awesome because sometimes you think like, oh, what I learned in lecture doesn't actually mean anything.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Capstone is a research can be a real synthesizing experience. Exactly. So you've been involved in this project now from sort of the beginning to the end. You you know been drafting a manuscript for publication. When was a moment that you realized, hey, this might actually lead to something genuinely new?

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Yeah, absolutely. And so obviously, there have been a few moments throughout the course of the project where I've been like, wow, this might be new, this might be really cool. Um like I mentioned earlier, I had sort of formulated the idea for this project. And so going and seeing that you have, you know, copper and dysprosium, copper and yttrium, you know, my professor sort of shooed me in the right direction, look at dysprosium and yttrium, look at the phase diagram. Can we combine them? And can we get dysprosium and yttrium, because they're completely soluble, to you know, locate on the the beta sub lattice, which is that sort of central point in your crystal lattice, and will they just sort of randomly order? So will you have like that ordered intermetallic that's also disordered because the dysprosium and yttrium are all over? And we didn't really know whether or not this was happened, but this was sort of the hypothesized condition and what we were really hoping we'd observe in the end condition. And so a few of the key moments where it was like, oh, maybe we've actually done this. Obviously, when you hold the you know, alloy system for the first time, you took it out of the arc melter, which is the thing you put it in to melt it. And I've like the Drew who had done a lot of the support in helping us arc melt that was like handed over to me, and I was like, wow, I'm like the first person to ever hold this, which is like so cool. Right. Like that's really awesome. So I was holding these alloy compositions that had been. It hadn't necessarily ever been like seen before in you know the real world. And so that was so cool. That was really cool. And then obviously, you know, I did a lot of you know fundamental characterization looking at things, not necessarily using advanced techniques until this past fall, uh, when I was very much interested in, you know, what's the actual underlying structure, and it was taking a while to go and get someone to do the TEM for us, the transmission electron microscopy. And so I was like, you know, I I want to know and I want to go and probe this and see if we see anything interesting. So I went to one of the grad students. I was like, hey, can you bring me back to the X-ray diffractometer, the XRD instrument in the back, and I'll get you dunky donuts if you run my sample for me? And he was like, sure. And so we went back over to the XRD, and you know, we ran my sample through and I mapped it against what we saw in those like B2 structures, the B2 copper, the B or the B2 copper dysprosium, the B2 copper atrium. And it didn't show two distinct peaks, right? Like you you'd expect two different things for where the uh you know the specific plane for each of those you know lattice parameters are, um, but it it didn't show two distinct peaks. And so what this sort of made me hypothesize immediately when I went and showed Dr. Lee, that really expedized expedited the electron microscopy process, was like, oh, we might actually be forming the structure that we've hypothesized that we're forming. And so we went and we, you know, got to go work with uh Dr. Einau, who's also a professor at UConn and his one of his postdocs, Sarshad, uh, who has been absolutely fabulous, and he did a lot of you know cool electron microscopy. And by the end, like I think it was by the end of this semester, we got him the samples. I got him a bunch of samples, and we went and we met and we chatted about what he was going to see, and went up and looked at some of the electron microscopy with him. And uh by the end of the semester, we had observed this new structure, which we had hypothesized seeing, which was like so cool. Yeah. And so that was another time where it was like full circle moment. Exactly. We're see we've seen this thing in the X-ray diffraction, and you know, does it actually are we actually seeing this? And based on, you know, the the fraction arrangement and the you know the um what we're seeing in those super lattice reflections and how they're very strong. Like it was just so cool, and it also was a cool like learning moment because it applied back to the characterization class that I was taking at the same time. Then we went we had another alloy system, we saw something really cool and new in there, and so you know, being able to go, and now we're actually like initially we thought this was just gonna be one paper that had some of the cool, you know, mechanical behavior and you know, underlying explanation for the structure and you know why we're observing what we're observing, but we've seen so many cool things in the you know microstructure that now we're going and we're turning it into two papers, which is pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

So very cool. Um, so how have some of the experiences you've had outside of UConn impacted you? How have they changed or defined who you are as a material science and maybe what your future plans are?

SPEAKER_01 27:30

Absolutely. And so, you know, I've had quite a few really cool experiences outside of UConn. And I like to first go to uh what I did this past summer. I mentioned, you know, working on the book this past summer, but I also had the opportunity to go and do a NSF RAU. And if you're not familiar, that's like a National Science Foundation research experience for undergraduates. And so pretty much what happens is people from our institutions from across the US get funding from the National Science Foundation to bring in undergraduate students from across the country and go and do some really cool and really cutting edge research. And so I applied to a bunch and I got a really great offer to do research over at UC Berkeley in California, working with Dr. Andrew Minor. And I had gone to Dr. Lee and I'd been like, oh, you know, I'm interested in some of these programs. He was like, Oh, you should apply the one at UC Berkeley and work with, you know, Andy Minor. He's awesome, he's really great. And so then I got this offer and I checked, and it was like work with Dr. Andrew Minor. I was like, that's really cool. And he was doing a lot of in-situ transmission electron microscopy. And so, you know, throughout the end of last semester, I was reaching out to him. We were chatting about, you know, potential projects and stuff that I might be able to do. And it was just like, wow, this is gonna be really great. I got to go out there, you know, they paid for me to live in California, which was really awesome. I got a stipend, I got a meal plan, um, I got to go and work up at the national labs, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which is so cool at the National Center for Electron Microscopy. I got my own little desk, sat with all the other interns. It was just like, it was so much fun and it was really great. And I not only learned a lot about, you know, material science and engineering, right? I learned these really cool things, ended up actually getting to bring back to the project I was working on at UConn, but I also got to make these great connections over at Berkeley with, you know, professors and with people who were working in national labs. And so it was just such a fabulous experience. And I loved not only the things that I got it got to do, but also, you know, the amazing people that I got to chat with and work with. And, you know, in addition to this, I've also been very much supported in going to a couple conferences throughout my time here. I think going to conferences is one of the most impactful experiences you could have as an undergraduate student. And the first ever conference I went to was this conference called IMAT, which is like the International Materials and Technologies Conference. It was in Cleveland. I was going with you know the Material Advantage chapter at UConn. We were participating in this competition called Domes Day. What Domesday is, is it's a competition where you go and you design a geodesic dome and you bring it to a competition, they smush it under like a load cell, so a hydraulic press. And it's pretty much like who can make the best dome. A bunch of YouTube videos on that. Yes, exactly. Yeah, which is pretty, yeah, I know. That's um I we we smushed it. I was like, man, I've seen this before on shorts.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

Where have I seen this, right? Exactly. It's cool stuff.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

But it was really, you know, it was such a great experience. And you know, we were competing against teams from across the world, and it came second place, and I was like, this is so much fun. And that whole competition is facilitated by the uh student board of trustees. And so ASM, which is the you know uh ASM International, is like a one of the biggest material science engineering professional societies, and they have like a board and they have three student members that are on their board every year. And so, you know, I was chatting with you know a couple of the board members, and they were like, oh, you know, this it's been super fun, it's been really great. We get to go to all these things, yada, yada, it's great, it's great. And then this past spring I saw the application go out for like student board members. I was like, oh, that would be really cool. You know, I talked to this guy, Nathan, and he was really fun, and you know, it seemed like you know, he'd been gotten to do a lot of really cool things because he was on this board, meet a lot of really great people, and so I was like, let me go and let me apply. And I, you know, shot in the dark, ended up getting picked, which was really cool. So I got to go to, you know, a meeting back in Cleveland, I got to go to this iMat again this year and judge the Domesday competition, which was super fun. Very cool, and it was also really great because that same guy, Nathan, was at the same internship that I had this past summer over at Berkeley.

SPEAKER_00 31:01

And so networking and connections.

SPEAKER_01 31:03

Yeah, it's like it you realize how you know, even though everything is very spread out, and he goes to Minnesota and you know, um lives a totally different life for me. We sort of our our paths got intertwined in two different ways, which was really funny. But you know, have had so many cool experiences outside of just the standard Yukon classroom and you know, doing research work at UConn that have enabled me to go and meet these really cool people and you know have these really cool research experiences and have really, you know, paved the path for defining what exactly it is that I want to do in the future.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

So, final question. Um, you're graduating this coming Saturday. You were recently awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, super prestigious, you know, like 2,500 of them in the entire nation, which is amazing. We had eight students win a GRFP here at UConn, and you were one of them. Um, and so what is next? And you know, how do you think your Yukon experience has supported you in moving into that next chapter?

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Absolutely. So, what's next for me? Uh, I'm super excited. I'll be going to Stanford. Awesome. To back to California. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I just loved it so much out there. It's hard to go wrong with the Bay Area. Absolutely. Uh yeah, and I'm going to Stanford to do my PhD in material science and engineering. Uh, this is something that was really, you know, it's tough to pick a grad school, right? I was going and I was looking at, you know, uh UC Berkeley, which is where I did my research this past summer, and Santa Barbara, which had you know, fabulous structural materials research. Like I'm gonna do that. Touching a theme here, California schools. Caltech was also a great option. And so I was very interested in, you know, all of those programs. Uh, but you know, what really made Stanford stand out was the fabulous research facilities. They had so many great offerings, and you know, the I liked the way the program was structured. I liked the facilities they had. They just, you know, Stanford used to have like a uh an accelerator that ended up getting moved to Slack. Yeah, but it used to be underneath Stanford's campus. And so they took the old end of the accelerator and turned it into a giant electron microscopy lab, which is awesome. It's deep. And that was, they were like, oh, you know, you want to do electron microscopy. This is kind of the place to be. And so it really felt like the perfect storm. And I'll also say that one of the main reasons I ended up choosing to go to Stanford was because of the professor and you know, word of advice that I can echo to anyone who's going through the grad school admissions and decisions process. And what was most important for me is it's it's less about like the school and the prestige and you know, the money. It's more about the person you work with. Yeah, absolutely. And so the person I ended up deciding that I I thought would be you know a great fit for me to work with was Dr. Reedy. And I actually had worked with her this past summer at Berkeley. She was a postdoc in the group that I was working in as a brand new incoming professor at Stanford. Uh and so you know, I get to be one of her first. A lot of chance to be PhD students, which is really awesome, yeah. And it's nice because it's like a chance to build stuff, but it's also I'm not gonna be too delayed by having to build stuff because a lot of it is shared facilities, uh, which is really neat. And so being the first student in a lab is like you get to set a lot of the colours. Exactly, setting the tones, that's a cool culture, which I'm super excited about. And then, you know, obviously that means she has some startup funding, so she has more flexibility in what she's working on, but I'm my message her. I was like, Oh, I got the GRFP. And she's like, that's awesome. Way to go. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

That helps her too, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:07

Exactly. And she was like, How would you feel about this summer? We'll meet uh a couple times, we'll chat about potential projects that you could do, right? Because I I want you to go and define your own project, which I thought was really awesome. And then she was like, Yeah, let's go and we'll talk with you know other professors at Stanford about you know different projects that they're interested in doing and you know, sort of try to develop this co-advising relationship because I really do want it to be very collaborative as well. I was like, that just sounds so awesome. And so, you know, having this person who was very supportive of me and what I was interested in doing, and really that goal to go and you know define the group culture and define the project and define you know what the research group was going to be, uh just sounded so appealing to me. And then couple that with you know receiving this, you know, fellowship and that giving me a lot more freedom and flexibility uh was just it really felt like the perfect storm. And so I'm super excited to go out to Stanford and do my PhD. Obviously, nothing can match the amazing experience that I've had at UConn. But I do find it really funny that when I first got you know the decision notification, I was outside in front of my house and we were getting like two feet of snow and I was shoveling, and I was like, as a kid, I used to love to shovel snow, but then you know, now I was like, oh man, shoveling snow sucks. Then I go inside and get a call from a Stanford professor, Kate, and she was like, Nice, oh, you know, we're excited to welcome you to Stanford. I was like, this is so awesome. I can leave the snow for a bit. But you know, like you mentioned, how has this been governed by you know the experience I've had at UConn? I attribute everything that I'm able to do in the future to the experience that I've had here, to the you know, amazing people, the the professors, the the staff in the MSc department, you know, Dr. Lee, Dr. Fiona Leek, who has like been like a lab mom and has truly been there for us throughout the past three years since the time that I've commenced the Marshall again. Absolutely just gotta be Commensant Marshall forever. Um and as well as you know the other students who have just been such a fabulous tool and resource. And you know, I go and I study with them and we hang out together, work on projects together, you know, we work on our senior design together, you know. I'm I'm in the same lab as Reed, and so we're writing these, you know, thesis papers together and we're collaborating for research. So I'm helping him out, and he's helping me out. And so it really has been, you know, a um a culminative effort of everyone who has put support into making this journey that I've had at UConn possible. And none of what I'd be able to do later down the line would be possible without the things that they have done for me. And so forever grateful for UConn and so incredibly excited for what's next.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

Amazing. Well, we look forward to celebrating you at graduation. You're one of our banner carriers for uh for the ceremony on Saturday, and we will definitely be interested to see what you do next at Stanford. Thanks so much for joining us, AWE. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be here. Wyatt Story reminds us that innovation doesn't just happen in labs, it also happens when knowledge is shared, curiosity is encouraged, and students are inspired to explore fields they may never have known existed. Through both his research and his outreach work, Wyatt is helping push material science forward while also opening doors for future engineers to follow. That spirit of discovery and mentorship is at the heart of Because of UConn. By supporting undergraduate research, faculty collaboration, and educational outreach, UConn gives students the opportunity not only to contribute to meaningful discoveries, but to help others see themselves in those fields as well. Because of Yukon, students like Wyeth can take part in groundbreaking research while also shaping the future of engineering education and accessibility. With that, we're wrapping up the final regular season episode of season one. It's honestly hard to believe an entire academic year has gone by already. And over the course of this season, we've had the chance to hear incredible stories from students across Yukon engineering. Stories of research, leadership, entrepreneurship, creativity, and persistence. We're not done yet. This summer we're going to be bringing you a series of special alumni episodes featuring Huskies who have taken their Yukon experiences into industry, research labs, startups, and communities around the world. And we can't wait to share those conversations with you. Thanks for listening all season long, and thanks for celebrating the students, faculty, and alumni who make this community so special. We look forward to starting season two in the fall.