Elizabeth Rasmussen. Photo date 7/2/2019 by Dennis Wise, University of Washington

Doctoral student Elizabeth Rasmussen was recently selected as a research fellow in the National Research Council (NRC) Research Associateship Program overseen by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). Fellows are chosen through an extremely selective national competition where only 6% of applicants receive the honor. The award is designed to give early career researchers with promise of becoming creative leaders in their field a chance for advanced training while working on a research proposal of their own choosing.

Rasmussen will carry out her proposed research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. Advised by NIST’s Mark McLinden in the Applied Chemicals and Materials Division within the Material Measurement Laboratory, she will develop state-of-the-art equipment to measure currently undefined material properties of liquid metals and organic solvents that are key to faster and smarter design and data-driven manufacturing of advanced materials.

“The research I’ll be conducting at NIST is more fundamental than my dissertation work,” says Rasmussen. “During my Ph.D. I’ve helped further sustainable and scalable advanced material manufacturing of a set of materials called metal oxides and metal-organic frameworks. I’m very proud of the work I have accomplished and believe it will continue to impact sustainable manufacturing of metal oxides and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), but while doing it I was surprised to find a lot of knowledge gaps in the thermophysical properties for commonly used materials. The knowledge gaps surprised me because they have vast implications, so the research I plan to conduct at NIST aids not only advanced manufacturing of materials used in clean energy applications but also for applications currently unimaginable.”

Rasmussen, who is advised by Professor John Kramlich and Research Associate Professor Igor Novosselov, will be defending her thesis this summer and start at NIST in the fall.

“I am excited and humbled to have been selected as an NRC fellow. The strong and rare technical expertise of the staff at NIST coupled with the world-class facilities makes it one of the few places in the world I can do this kind of research,” says Rasmussen. “I’m so thankful for all the support I’ve had at UW over the past five years from my advisors, the Mechanical Engineering department, the Clean Energy Institute and the eScience Institute.”