Highlights from the end of Summer 2026!

Summer 2026 has come to a close. We enjoyed having the dedicated research time to push projects forward. Many celebrations happened at the end of the summer worth highlighting.

1) Jill presented a poster at the Stereochemistry Gordon Research Conference at Salve Regina University. She found the technical talks inspiring and the extracurricular adventures amusing. Pictured below is Jill on a boat cruise with many of the Assistant Professors in attendance at the conference.

2) Ajay Raju and Gabriel Villacres-Balseca presented posters at the URECA & SOAR poster symposium on Friday, July 31st. Both were commended for the presentation of their projects and for fielding questions from a very broad audience. Pictured below is Gabriel and mentor James at the poster session.

3) The Alty Group hosted its first annual Summit & Group Challenge! For a one-day retreat, each group member presented a brief research presentation with background and progress made over the summer. We combined the Summit event with a Group Challenge, focused on how to combat the environmental challenges associated with AI data centers. Congratulations to the winning team (Ajay, Ethan, and James) for their idea of synthetic diamond semiconductors! A big thank you to our industry guest judges, Dr. So Young Lee (Merck) and Dr. Carolyn Barnes (Lam Research). We were having too much fun to take photos. We'll fix that next year!