Nikolas Hall

Experience

• 

  Harvey Mudd College

  Jan 2022 - now

  I am part of a team that fabricates and characterizes photovoltaic cells. Our current research is focused on lead sulfide quantum dots. In the fall of 2023, my research partner and I developed a procedure for blade-coating quantum dots onto our cells. I tutor for Academic Excellence, a peer tutoring service for Harvey Mudd College's Core Curriculum. During weekly tutoring hours, I offer homework help and concept review for students taking courses in special relativity, calculus-based mechanics, and electromagnetism. I assist Isabel Balseiro, a Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvey Mudd College, as she conducts research into the life of María Acuña, a 20th-century Spanish poet. My work has involved organizing research materials, indexing the poet's notebooks, and transcribing interviews about her life. I filtered the NASA Exoplanet Archive to create distributions of mass, eccentricity, and period ratio in compact exoplanet systems. These informed the planetary dynamics simulations of fellow student Brandon Bonifacio.This work was supervised by Daniel Tamayo, a Professor of Astrophysics at Harvey Mudd College. I graded and held weekly tutoring hours for CS 5, Harvey Mudd's Python-based introductory computer science course. I continued to design and revise experiments for Harvey Mudd's Core chemistry laboratory course. This involved developing new procedures, testing experiments from previous years, and updating the course's laboratory manual. I helped develop a metal-organic framework synthesis for Harvey Mudd's Core chemistry laboratory course, which is taken by all first-year students.

  • Chemistry Research Assistant

    Sept 2023 - now

  • Academic Excellence Tutor

    Aug 2023 - now

  • Literature Research Assistant

    Aug 2022 - now

  • Astrophysics Research Assistant

    Jan 2023 - May 2023

  • Computer Science Grader

    Aug 2022 - Dec 2022

  • Chemistry Research Assistant

    May 2022 - Jul 2022

  • Chemistry Research Assistant

    Jan 2022 - May 2022
• 

  Cornell University

  Jun 2023 - Aug 2023

  Summer Researcher

  I used spectral line emission to study gas in high-redshift galaxies. For two galaxies, I created spatially resolved maps of line emission from ionized carbon and nitrogen. I presented my findings through a research talk and poster session at Cornell.