Katelyn Kirchner, Ph.D.

Experience

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  Panera Bread

  May 2015 - Sept 2015

  Café Associate

  Roles included: Cashier, barista and dining room maintenance, all of which developed my customer service appreciation and skillset.

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  Total

  Aug 2015 - Aug 2015

  Practicum Experience

  Shadowed employees at TOTAL Cray Valley, Inc - an adhesive and tap company in Exton, PA. With this experience, I gained an insight into the different roles within an engineering company. (i.e. marketing, sales, finance, business management, research and development, quality control, manufacturing, etc.). The practicum enlightened my passion for specifically the research and development side of Materials Science.

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  Penn State University

  Sept 2016 - now

  Investigate structure-property-performance relationships in glass-forming systems, specifically focused on quantifying the consequences of spatial and temporal fluctuations. I am interested in all aspects of condensed matter physics and materials theory, problem-solving, and computation of disordered materials. Properties of interest include rigidity, viscosity, relaxation, and heat capacity. Computational techniques of interest focus on numerical programming, statistical mechanics, and Molecular Dynamics (MD). Ph.D. advisor is Dr. John C. Mauro. Show less

  • NSF Graduate Research Fellow

    Aug 2020 - now

  • Graduate Teaching Assistant

    Aug 2020 - May 2022

  • Undergraduate Researcher - Glass Modeling

    Aug 2017 - Jul 2020

  • Undergraduate Researcher - Coarse-grained modeling polymers

    Sept 2016 - Aug 2017
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  Penn State Speaking Center

  Sept 2017 - May 2020

  Public Speaking Mentor

  Mentor fellow undergraduates at Penn State University's Public Speaking Center to improve their speech writing and public speaking skills. I underwent a 16-week training course (3 hours a week) to examine the theory and proper techniques of public speaking and mentoring. In this training we learned to tailor one's approach based on the specific mentee to best aid in topic development, outline revisions, visual aid creation, and delivery techniques.

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  Corning Incorporated

  May 2018 - Aug 2018

  Applied Processes for Manufacturing Intern

  As an applied Processes for Manufacturing Intern, I (1) investigated the salt removal process and residual moisture content on pharmaceutical glass vials in the pursuit of designing an efficient pilot production process for high volume manufacturing, (2) programmed an employee talent database (for 300+ employees) in the RD&E department to ensure business needs are met and hiring gaps are known, and (3) developed programming solutions for data analysis automation. 1st Corning Performance Excellence Award - awarded for outstanding delivery of the employee talent database2nd Corning Performance Excellence Award - awarded for the initiative to take on additional projects to benefit the group (i.e., the initiative to design programming solutions to automate data analysis tasks) Show less

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  Corning Incorporated

  May 2019 - Aug 2019

  Materials Modeling Intern

  Derived new statistical approach for calculating structural fluctuations in disordered materials to improve statistical sampling of site occupation and investigate glass thermodynamic properties. Resulted in 1 publication.Performance Excellence Award - awarded July 2019

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  Corning Incorporated

  May 2021 - Aug 2021

  Modeling, Software, and Analytics Intern

  Derived, developed, and programmed (in python) a new viscosity model that outperforms previously-published energy landscape models in predicting equilibrium and non-equilibrium viscosity. Internally published corresponding software and report.Performance Excellence Award - awarded for the success of our newly-developed internal model

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  Hokkaido University

  Aug 2022 - Feb 2023

  Visiting Research Scientist

  Worked as an experimentalist, synthesizing and characterizing thin film SiOx. Work included designing experiments to optimize thin film synthesis [via Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD), Plasma Enhance ALD (PEALD), Plasma Enhance Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD)], HF cleaning, investigating freestanding films transfer techniques, and characterization via TEM, SEM, STEM, XRR, and Grazing Incident X-ray Diffraction (GI-XRD).