UTB students to work with MIT researchers
BROWNSVILLE – Two students at The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College have been chosen to participate in the Summer Research Program sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Office of the Dean for Graduate Education in Cambridge, Mass.
Liliana Ruiz-Diaz, 21 a junior physics major from Matamoros, Mexico and Sergio H. Cantu, 22, a junior physics and mathematics major from Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, will start Thursday, June 5 in the two-month program ending in early August. Both are scheduled to graduate in May 2012.
The research program promotes diversity, graduate education and enterprising research. The program began in 1986 and gives chosen participants opportunities to receive academic counseling, work with an MIT faculty member and graduate or postdoctoral student, listen to research presentations and work in advanced laboratories. Participants must write weekly reports detailing the progress of their work.
Sergio H. Cantu
Cantu will work in MIT’s Space Propulsion Laboratory to help develop a thruster that can shoot and push ion beams in more than one direction for satellites and other equipment to move in space. He will work with Dr. Paulo Lozano, MIT’s H.N. Slater Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
“This is aerospace and I’m a physics major,” said Cantu. “It’s one of those things I want to do before I graduate to try something else.”
This will be the second summer that Cantu has been part of the program. Last year he helped build an interferometric displacement sensor.
“They always encourage you that if MIT is the place to be, you apply again and you will not just be a number in graduate school,” said Cantu.
He said the pace of work is faster with projects, something he expects to encounter when he starts professional work after graduation.
“When you are doing it you don’t realize you are learning a lot,” he said.
Cantu said his parents encouraged him, his twin sister and UTB/TSC senior education major Magali and brother and UTB/TSC sophomore biology major Anuar to study in the United States. Cantu originally applied to another university but got discouraged over paperwork and admissions testing. He carried his standardized test scores and transcripts with him when he traveled with his sister to help her enroll for classes. UTB/TSC admissions staff looked at his paperwork and told him he could get accepted if he formally applied.
“I think we have a close relationship with the physics faculty,” said Cantu. “They are pushing us to go to graduate school.”
Liliana Ruiz-Diaz
Ruiz-Diaz will work on the development of nanowires made of strained silicon and Geimanium for low power electronics like cell phones and computers. She will use atomic microscopes to construct materials with different chemical techniques. She will work with MIT’s Dr. Judy L. Hoyt and Dr. Dimitri A. Antoniadis, both professors in electrical engineering and computer science.
“For me, it’s to get experience working in a different environment,” said Ruiz-Diaz. “We are here doing research but we have the perspective here. If we go somewhere else we will get another perspective of research.”
She applied for the program because as a physics major, she said it is expected of students to get as much out of classroom experience as possible.
Ruiz-Diaz enrolled at UTB/TSC as an engineering major but was encouraged by a friend to visit the Department of Physics and Astronomy’s faculty members and facilities. She decided to change majors so she could learn more about the physics of electronics, something she studied when she was in high school in Matamoros.
“Since there are not a lot of students here, we get to do more research,” she said. “We have opportunities with experiments and reading the articles that we would have at other universities.”
For more information on the Department of Physics and Astronomy, contact (956) 882-6779.
