This past spring, Marie Blatnik ‘15 (BS Physics Honors, BS Electrical Engineering Honors) successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis in Physics entitled “Creating the Electric and Magnetic Fields for the nEDM@SNS Experiment” at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Marie also just became a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, New Mexico) where she will be developing a technique to use ultracold neutrons as an actinide surface probe.

CSU prepared Marie for graduate school with its course work, summer research opportunities, local SPS chapter, physics Teaching Assistantships (she taught intro physics labs; did SPS outreach) and its honors program and Choose Ohio First communities. However, CSU had no nuclear physics. Marie needed to see what accelerator-based science is for herself, so she joined an REU at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to work on the COMPASS experiment. Then she did a National Student Exchange at Stony Brook, joining the PHENIX collaboration at Brookhaven to work on particle detectors, which led her to test prototypes at the Stanford Linear Accelerator & Fermilab. She met the ultracold neutron community at a conference and fell in love with the controllable free neutrons and Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she did her Senior Design work on the electronics for the UCNA/B experiments.

Marie graduated Summa Cum Laude from CSU in 2015 and has been chasing neutrons since. Her PhD work took her to Los Alamos and Oak Ridge National Labs as part of a collaboration to place new limits on the neutron electric dipole moment to find fingerprints of extra CP violation outside of the Standard Model. Marie’s work in Los Alamos was centered around creating the high voltage for this cryogenic experiment. Her work in Oak Ridge was to maximize the polarization and transmission of a cold neutron beam through the many layers of the experimental apparatus -- work for which she received an Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) award.

Marie’s favorite ways to share the joy of physics with others include Clubes de Ciencia Mexico (a program for US and Mexican researchers to teach weeklong classes on cutting-edge science) and being a Nuclear Physics Merit Badge Counselor for the Boy Scouts. Marie also enjoys whitewater kayaking in her spare time, but spare time is hard to come by as she and her husband Matt Buck have a daughter, Jordan.

Please join us in congratulating Marie on finishing her PhD and starting her work at the Los Alamos National Lab! Long Live Physics at CSU!