Goldwater Scholarship recipient Joanna Moody '14.

A Bates College student aiming to become a railroad systems engineer has received a prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship to support her studies.

A sophomore, Joanna Moody of Charlottesville, Va., is triple-majoring in physics, math and Japanese. Moody has spent the current academic year at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan.

The scholarship program honoring the late Sen. Barry M. Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. The Goldwater is the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields.

Moody is one of 282 U.S. students to receive a Goldwater Scholarship for the 2012–13 academic year. The one- and two-year scholarships cover the cost of tuition, fees, books and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.

A second Bates student, Daniel Peach of Madison, Ala., received an honorable mention from the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. Peach, a junior mathematics and philosophy major at Bates, plans to conduct research in numerical analysis and algorithm design while teaching at the graduate-school level.

Moody intends to earn a doctorate in systems engineering after she graduates from Bates, with the longer-term goal of a career in railroad traffic control technology.

“The Goldwater Scholarship is recognition of my efforts and ambitions,” says Moody. “It’s a green light that affirms that I should continue to study in pursuit of my career dreams despite the many obstacles that I may face along the way.”

Moody has studied Japanese language and culture, as well as business and economics, during her stay in Japan. Less formally, she has also researched the significance of railroads in Japanese culture. “I’ve focused on how the railroad historically was a symbol of Japanese modernization, and how today it remains an integral part of the social network of Japan,” says Moody, a rail fan whose train travels in Japan have been as much for enjoyment as research.

“I’m interested in comparing this train-oriented society with the car-oriented society of America,” she says. “I’ve always preferred the feeling of trains over other forms of transportation, but as I’ve learned more about it, I’ve realized that it’s a shame that more Americans don’t utilize the railroad for environmental and economic reasons as well.”

In her first two years at Bates, Moody’s activities included participation in the physics lab of assistant professor Nathan Lundblad, who researches atomic behavior at ultralow temperatures. Moody’s contributions included computer programming and hands-on work with experimental apparatus, including lasers and vacuum chambers.

“I chose Bates because I wanted an academically rigorous, well-rounded liberal arts education in a small school where I could have strong relationships with my professors,” Moody says.

But she has found, in addition, that Bates “has been flexible in accommodating my rather unusual course of study at the school,” including approving her triple major and allowing her to pursue studies in Japan.

“I’m very grateful for this flexibility and the control it gives me over what I chose to study.”

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency. Since its first award in 1989, it has bestowed more than 6,200 scholarships worth approximately $39 million.

Assistant Professor of Physics Nathan Lundblad is the first member of the Bates College faculty to receive a Defense Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR) grant from the U.S. Department of Defense.

Sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the grant is for $388,088 over three years. It will fund Lundblad’s research into atomic activity at ultralow temperatures. Bates is the only liberal arts school in the nation and the only academic institution in Maine to receive a DEPSCoR grant this year.

It’s well-established that certain materials become extremely efficient electrical conductors — superconductors — when cooled well below freezing. But why particular materials behave this way at such temperatures, potentially suitable for practical application, isn’t clear. Lundblad hopes to better understand this phenomenon by taking it to the extreme: He will study the subatomic behavior of matter when cooled to about 100 billionths of a degree above the temperature, roughly 460 degrees below zero, where atomic motion ceases — absolute zero.

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Lundblad plans to observe a sample of ultracold gas called a Bose-Einstein condensate. At such low temperatures, the locations of the gas atoms become fundamentally indistinguishable. With the gas confined in a vacuum chamber, he will use laser beams to create “optical lattice traps” that simulate the complicated behavior of electrons in high-temperature superconductors.

But the simulation will be “cleaner,” or subject to fewer variables, than its crystalline high-temperature counterparts. The hope is that the gas particles’ behavior at near absolute zero will shed light on particle behavior in crystalline high-temperature situations.

While any applications of the research won’t come for quite a long time, the work could support important technological advances. “An electrical grid made of a high-temperature superconductor, for example, could be immensely cheaper than our current system,” he says. Timekeeping and other measurement systems could also benefit.

Any military applications, Lundblad adds, would be nonspecific and on a long time scale. “I like to think of ultracold atoms as a field similar to the laser in the 1960s — a hotbed of research, but nobody knew quite what to do with them yet.”

The Department of Defense takes the long view, he explains. “Similar to its funding of research related to creating the Internet, they figure that spending research dollars advances the cause of the country in general, and if they reap some technological benefit 30 years down the line, so be it.”

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