Congratulations Summit Shrestha!
The RPM group is thrilled to congratulate Summit for receiving the Academic Engagement Award and the Research Award granted by the College of Engineering and Applied Science. Summit has worked on two different projects in Dr. Tim White's lab. For his first project, he worked closely with recent PhD recipient: Melvin Colorado Escobar on the application of liquid crystal elastomers in multi-fiber systems. Summit was specifically tasked with understanding the thermomechanical response of these materials to understand how different processing techniques (number of fibers, number of twists, type of bundle) affect actuation. The work he contributed earned him a co-authorship on a few papers that Melvin was working on at the time.
For his senior thesis, Summit undertook a more fundamental project exploring the implications of molecular weight on the phase transition of liquid crystal elastomers, working with David Kennedy as my mentor. This project used a wide variety of characterization techniques (FTIR, NMR, DSC, GPC) to elucidate potential relationships between molecular weight and transition temperature and dispersity and phase transition width. This work is still ongoing with goals of Summit being published as a first author.