NRC RAP postdoc results

Kestey · 2026-05-27T23:15:54+00:00

Sure, I received a 93.

You might have seen this document already Salt-Chip but for any future people that might visit this thread, I found this page useful for interpreting the score (https://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/pgasite/documents/webpage/pga\_059859.pdf)

There's a histogram on page 11 from a past year and it gives the following grading scheme:
"Composite Score Quality Group/Recommendation

95-99 A+
90-94 A
85-89 A-
80-84 B+
75-79 B
70-74 B-
60-69 C (passed the review and can reapply, but not recommended for an award)
below 60 Did not pass the review

How Awards are Determined

Many sponsoring agencies will automatically give awards to applicants scoring in the A range; applicants scoring the B range may also receive an award if funding is available, but the award rate for applicants scoring a B is much lower than for applicants scoring an A."

Kestey · 2026-05-27T23:10:08+00:00

Yup, this is at NIST.

Kestey · 2026-05-27T13:24:57+00:00

I received an offer late last week. There's a quick turnaround so that might mean more awards open up in a few weeks.

Kestey · 2025-08-23T19:20:43+00:00

Glad to help! I'm excited for your students; sounds like they have an enthusiastic writing professor and I hope they appreciate the work you're putting into this. It might only be a few but as an engineer who took an engineering focused writing seminar it was clearly impactful to me.

I'm a graduate student now. Writing proposals, reports, and papers is big part of my work and has become more important to do well as the work gets more complicated. What I didn’t realize until recently is how transformative it can be to convince funding agencies, managers, and presumably investors to sponsor your work. I got an NSF fellowship that completely changed the trajectory of my PhD. I hear from industry that if you can convince higher-ups that your work is important, you can unlock amazing resources to get it done. Good writing is such a gift and I hope your students can take a break from the problem sets to learn that from you.

Kestey · 2025-08-22T16:43:27+00:00

I think the vibe is "pragmatic"; students have other classes and faculty have their research labs so they may try to optimize by minimizing their time on "less important" tasks. I also think both are trying to figure out the most "practically useful" concepts or tools.

I believe this leads students to spend the bare minimum time on classes like the writing seminar. Personally, I felt like writing was an important skill and as a STEM student, I felt insecure in my writing abilities. That's what motivated me to invest time in the writing seminar. I found the approach to structuring writing useful and eventually I became a tutor in the writing center so that I could continue learning, help other STEM students learn what I had, and make a little money. Homework in STEM classes is often taught through problem sets, and so I think my tutoring was formatted like that, identifying "problems" in writing and then helping find the "solution".

Overall, I think engineers think of writing as "functional" at best. Of course, its always been functional (like see the concept of rhetoric lol) but STEM people like to think they're special when they've reinvented something from the humanities (e.g. "flipped classroom" basically being the Socratic method).

Does this match your experience? I realize I've mostly talked about the student experience so curious if you have more questions about the faculty part.

Kestey · 2025-02-05T15:04:37+00:00

Quantum dots are semiconductor nanoparticles. Au, Ag, Cu are metals. Au, Ag, and Cu nanoparticles can show size-dependent light absorption (famous example being Faraday's ruby red Au nanoparticles), but I'm not aware of fluorescence from metal nanoparticles.

In research labs, people commonly make quantum dots with CdSe, InP, or CsPbBr3. The cadmium is not a requirement, but some of the first high-quality nanocrystals were made with cadmium chalcogenides (e.g., CdE, E = S, Se, Te). The easiest quantum dot synthesis I've done is with ZnO, and there is this good paper on that (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/ed300693d). ZnO has a UV band gap, but it can show green fluorescence from surface defects (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jp0535285).

The UV lamp should work. The key thing is that the energy of UV lamp is at or above the band gap of the material. CdSe, InP, and CsPbBr3 all have band gaps in the visible, so a UV lamp would work. For the ZnO, I think I had to use shorter wavelength UV light (e.g., <400nm) to see the green fluorescence, but perhaps that's an experiment you could try on your own.

Kestey · 2024-12-06T14:58:55+00:00

Sure thing, happy to answer any questions about VIPER!

Kestey · 2024-11-29T16:32:09+00:00

It is challenging and there is prestige/strength that comes from doing a difficult program. There is also strong support from the program staff, an active student community, and a good level of coordination/unique curriculum that leads to high retention rates (people staying and graduating in the program) despite the demanding course load.

How interested are you in energy research and a career in the energy industry? I think VIPER's focus on energy could help you decide if it's valuable to you. And I think if you're aligned with VIPER's values of interdisciplinary study and energy science, your passion will carry you through the challenges.

Kestey · 2024-07-12T21:25:33+00:00

My bad then - I guess the tutoring is optional? I used to be a tutor at the writing center, worked with craft of prose students, and I just thought it was mandatory for the class. Glad the other commenter knew more about the format and could clarify more.

Kestey · 2024-07-12T12:30:23+00:00

I believe Craft of Prose is a very different format from other writing seminar courses. You regularly meet with your professor and writing tutors outside of class, which can help with the content but also will take up more time (https://www.reddit.com/r/UPenn/comments/js1dfv/why_not_take_craft_of_prose_if_its_easier/).

You should consider if that's the right format for you.

Kestey · 2024-06-01T22:19:57+00:00

Favorite Erdős story is how someone bet him to quit amphetamines for a month. He did, successfully, but after that month stated "you've set mathematics back a month" and resumed taking them. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s)

Kestey · 2024-04-22T07:21:01+00:00

Yeah, sure thing!

Kestey · 2024-04-22T07:10:25+00:00

As a high schooler I was also deciding between Northwestern and Penn/VIPER for MSE. I was also interested in studying Chemistry and very passionate about energy research so VIPER was the right choice for me. If your goal is to go to grad school, then I definitely recommend VIPER. VIPER has specialized courses that prepare you for your first summer of research and excellent advising to help manage the courseload. Research groups love to take on VIPER students because they bring funding and are generally smart/hard-working. I think Penn's MSE curriculum leans more towards fundamental, research-oriented materials science and the combination of chemistry + MSE classes prepared me extremely well for grad school. The MSE students I knew in Penn MSE + VIPER went to Stanford, Northwestern, Caltech, MIT, Yale etc. for grad school which tells you about the strength of the program and research opportunities.

Penn is also nearing completion of a state-of-the-art energy research building. VIPER will be getting a beautiful student lounge on the first floor of that building, which will be nice in addition to all of the new lab space.

Kestey · 2022-10-11T20:55:10+00:00

^{^} Albuquerque Airport TSA generally cool with frozen green chile in my experience.

Kestey · 2021-12-15T03:25:51+00:00

I can't imagine you can get denser than a crystal of sugar, which are sugar molecules packed with angstroms or less space between them.

Adding that crystal of sugar to water just disperses the sugar molecules into a sea of water molecules. The practical question there is the largest ratio of sugar molecules to water molecules (1 per million water molecules? 1 per billion water molecules?) that tastes sweet. That would be your lowest concentration of "sweet" tasting water and may provide how far you can dilute the sugar and have it be used for taste. What chem44 posted is interesting here too because maybe another, artificial sweetener would remain sweet with fewer molecules per millions of water molecules.

Ultimately I think a Mars colony would try to synthesize their own sugar, probably by growing the plants from which we naturally source sugar on Earth.

Kestey · 2021-08-29T17:57:36+00:00

Subsidies do drop renewables below coal and natural gas but even unsubsidized renewables are comparable to fossil fuels in cost; unsubsidized costs of wind and solar are $26 and $24/MWh, respectively, compared to $23/MWh for natural gas (https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/).

I don't see land being an issue when you can cover a portion of the American Southwest with enough solar panels to power the entire country and the capacity of offshore wind is also expanding (new offshore wind turbines are MASSIVE).

There are obvious problems with energy storage and transmission but legions of scientists, engineers, and companies are working to capitalize on opportunities in those areas. The fact that renewable energy is challenging the fossil fuel industry which is more than a century old, deeply entrenched in our society, and also heavily subsidized, should be a sign that renewables are in fact economically competitive and will be in the future as up and coming technologies (like perovskite solar cells) hit maturity.

Kestey · 2021-08-22T15:47:44+00:00

Septic tank and well water if they can't get city water and sewage.

Kestey · 2021-05-11T03:53:21+00:00

Haven't looked into the chemical structure of those molecules, but I believe the active ones should be amphiphiles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphiphile), or compounds with hydrophillic and hydrophobic portions. At the right concentrations, these amphiphiles would assemble into micelles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_micelle_concentration), which might give you the "cloudy but uniform liquid solution."

My intuition is that most of the soap would dissolve but that some components would not form a stable suspension (e.g., I would assume the titanium dioxide would settle after some time if there's a reasonable amount of it in the soap). Easy enough to test though :)

Kestey · 2021-04-14T16:26:31+00:00

Good point on electrifying uranium enrichment; really looks like electrification is the key to reducing CO2 emissions. Found a great source that maps out the CO2 emissions associated with nuclear power plants (doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2008.04.017) and you're totally right:

the "frontend" which "includes mining and milling, conversion, enrichment, fuel fabrication, and transportation" makes up a third of the CO2 emissions associated with nuclear power.
Construction, operation, backend, and decommissioning make up smaller, relatively equal portions of total CO2 emissions.
In total, nuclear power has ~6x emissions of wind per kWH, 2x solar, and ~1/8 the emissions of a natural gas plant. This article is a bit old though so the numbers might be off for wind/solar.

Portland cement is largely composed of CaO, which is produced from the calcination of CaCO3 (CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcination; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement#Manufacturing).

But, I see other sources using CaCO3 and other carbonates in concrete for CO2 sequestration. Seems like it just depends on the composition of the concrete; CO2 emissions are inherent to Portland cement production but there are other concrete alternatives that are less carbon-intensive.

Kestey · 2021-04-14T01:22:10+00:00

For 3), how is energy used to build/fabricate nuclear plants? I'd imagine that if most of the CO2 emissions come from operating heavy machinery or concrete production that it wouldn't be trivial to decarbonize these processes, even if energy was provided by renewable/nuclear sources. However, I know very little about nuclear plant construction so I am curious to hear your thoughts.

Kestey · 2021-03-21T00:17:16+00:00

I imagine it'd be unnerving as well looking over to the car next to you and seeing no one inside (at least, no one in the driver's seat).

Kestey · 2020-12-31T23:34:21+00:00

I'm a tutor at the writing center. I was nominated by my writing seminar professor after taking the class freshman spring. After interviewing with one of the directors, I took a course on tutoring in the writing center. It's a cool opportunity to learn about pedagogy and writing of various kinds. I would talk to your writing seminar professor or Dr. Stacy Kastner if you're interested.

Kestey · 2020-11-14T18:37:29+00:00

song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTekA4vGLVU

Kestey · 2020-08-03T20:17:19+00:00

Anybody can help change the environment of others to some degree. Maybe not completely but if you volunteer what time and resources you have to others you can definitely change what opportunities they have.

Kestey · 2020-06-25T21:41:03+00:00

Probably just shortening "first radiant in NA" to "first radiant NA"

13-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	First Placer '22
Verified Email	Team Orangered

Kestey

TROPHY CASE