About Sarah Driscoll

Education

Sarah is currently completing her undergraduate degree at Vanderbilt University. She is pursuing both a technical and nontechnical degree which makes her education well-rounded. Sarah is hoping to pursue a Ph.D. in the future.

• Vanderbilt University
  • BE Chemical Engineering
  • BA Climate Studies

Research

Sarah has worked in two nanoscience laboratories on campus. She works with the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering as technical staff in the cleanroom. Sarah helps with tasks critical to the daily operation of the cleanroom as well as tweaks the recipe used to grow graphene with the goal of minimizing defects. She also helps in a lab in Vanderbilt’s Department of Chemical Engineering with the Kidambi Research Group. There, she is working to understand the effect of catalyst crystallinity on resulting conjugated nanostructures and their applications.

In the summer of 2023, she was a SULI intern at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory as a part of the Co-ACCESS group. Sarah spent her summer making calibration standards for fluorescence detectors at XAS beamlines.

Most recently, in the summer of 2024, Sarah was an MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) intern with Dr. Shirvan in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. She worked on organic cooled nuclear reactors to understand how organic fluids, like Paratherm, would react to radiation.

As a curious mind and in line with graduate school dreams, Sarah is always looking for new avenues to pique her research interests: especially in the field of renewable energy!

Technical Skills

Sarah has had lots of exposure to nanoscience procedures in her laboratories. Some of the tools and processes that she is proficient in are:

• Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD)
• Photolithography
• Metal Deposition
• Microfluidics
• 3-D Printing
• MATLAB
• Catalysis
• Synchrotrons
• X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy
• Nuclear Reactors
• Irradiation
• NMR
• GC-MS

Press

Sarah won second place in the national IGNITE Off! Interlab competition in September 2023 for persenting her SULI summer project. The Vanderbilt School of Engineering published an article that was republished by the Department of Energy Office of Science.

Sarah was recognized as a feature member of the cleanroom Technical Staff on the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering website.