Month: April 2023

Physics and Astronomy Ph.D. student, Scott Joffre has teamed up with Prakrit Subba, a graduate student in Biological Sciences to launch a podcast called Breaking Silos. The pair began the podcast in January and have released ten episodes to date. “Inspired to solve complicated problems by bringing together experts from different fields,” Joffre says, “Breaking Silos enables graduate students in all fields to showcase their research and discuss how their area of study can be applied to solving long-lasting problems in new ways.” Joffre and Subba have covered topics from applying to graduate school, career readiness, writing successful travel grants, ethics, entrepreneurship, and many more! You can check out Breaking Silos on Spotify here.  Happy listening!

On April 14, 2023, five Physics & Astronomy graduate students and one CU-ICAR graduate student conducting research at the Clemson Nanomaterials Institute (CNI) presented six papers at the annual SC EPSCoR conference in Summerville, SC. Basanta Ghimire, Evan Watkins, Nawraj Sapkota, Peshal Karki, and Janak Basel each presented their work at this year’s conference. In addition to the student presentations, Research Assistant Professor, Sriparna Bhattacharya also chaired one of the conference sessions.

The SC EPSCoR Program, joined by SC NASA EPSCoR, invited faculty, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, undergraduate students, and STEM professionals to this year’s state conference. Conference presentations built on the themes of the last five years, promoting collaboration among South Carolina colleges and universities.

The sun is an abundant — but still largely untapped — energy source.

With the push for renewable energy, researchers from the Clemson Nanomaterials Institute (CNI), led by Dr. Apparao Rao, and the Indian Institute of Science have designed a smart supercapacitor using a novel stack of metal oxides — vanadium pentoxide and zinc oxide — that can efficiently harvest energy from sunlight and simultaneously store it.

Read the full story here or watch the video on YouTube.