Recent Cal State Long Beach graduate Delora Gaskins received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship award for her research in the field of physical chemistry.
The fellowship provides a $30,000 annual stipend, a $10,500 tuition allowance, international research, professional development opportunities and access to the TeraGrid supercomputer for three years.
Gaskins, a Huntington Beach native, graduated cum laude in May with two Bachelor of Science degrees in chemistry and mathematics. She also received departmental honors in mathematics.
Gaskins began her pursuit of a Ph.D. in physical chemistry this month at Brandeis University to study chemical pattern formation.
“These patterns are very striking and up to this point they have only been seen experimentally in two dimensions, with just a handful of exceptions,” she said. “As a graduate student in the Epstein Laboratory at Brandeis, I will be looking at these patterns in three dimensions.”
At Brandeis, Gaskins uses the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction to create different patterns that change the proportions of some of the chemical ingredients.
“The three-dimensional patterns are not just the two-dimensional patterns stacked on top of each other;” she said. “There are some very different dynamics that we can see in three-dimension that just can’t occur in the two-dimensional system.”
Gaskins joined Stephen Mezyk’s RadKem research group during her freshman year at CSULB. She became interested in the field of physical chemistry because of a mathematics chaos class, in which she was able to perform a demonstration of the BZ reaction.
“Stephen Mezyk has been the most influential professor for me, though I’ve never had him for a class,” Gaskins said.
“I look to continue my commitment to support and engage my community through the medium of my research interests,” she said.
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