Brown Physics Ph.D. student and IMSD trainee Nicholas Drachman has been awarded a Graduate Fellowship for STEM Diversity (GFSD). GFSD is a partnership between government agencies and laboratories, industry, and higher education whose goal is to increase the number of American citizens with graduate degrees in STEM fields while emphasizing recruitment of a diverse applicant pool.

Nicholas will work at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on a device that can improve the measurement of nanoflow rates. According to Drachman, the group he will be working with at NIST, “has developed devices that can measure…the flow of liquid in a tiny channel very accurately down to very low values.” Drachman hopes this “NIST on a chip” technology, which can be used to measure fluid flow on the scale of nanoliters per minute, can be adapted to measure the flow rate in a novel nanopore ion source for mass spectrometry created in Professor Derek Stein’s laboratory. 

Additional details can be found in the news website for the department of physics.