Non-traditional student carves out future in physics

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Matt McCune

Not so long ago, Northwest physics major Matt McCune was just another young man from the North Kansas City suburbs. He’d graduated from North Kansas City High School and was working as a retail manager to pay the bills. But time started to slip by, and McCune, who hadn’t thought much about college after earning his diploma, was frustrated by his lack of career options.

“I wasn’t making very much money,” he said, “and I realized that I just didn’t want to do that kind of work for the rest of my life.”

So McCune enrolled in a nearby community college, where he made good grades and picked up an associate’s degree. Then, with the idea of maybe becoming a history teacher, he decided to continue his education at Northwest, where he rediscovered a boyhood fascination with science.

A “non-traditional student” with a few years in the “real world” under his belt, McCune said he had always enjoyed science as a youngster. And now, with help from Dr. Himadri Chakraborty, an assistant professor of chemistry and physics, he’s doing original nanoscience research and publishing the results in elite periodicals.

Suddenly the future is anything but a dead-end for the married 30-year-old, who hopes to graduate in spring 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in physics before going on to graduate school, where he thinks he may study engineering.

Earlier this year, a paper by McCune, Chakraborty and Mohamed E. Madjet of the Free University of Berlin was published in the “Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics” (Institute of Physics Publishing).

The paper, “Unique role of orbital angular momentum in subshell-resolved photoionization of C60,” describes certain characteristics of a group of tiny structures called fullerenes, specifically hollow spheres of carbon molecules known as buckyballs.

Buckyballs are so named because of their resemblance to a geodesic dome, a soccer ball-like form popularized by architect R. Buckminster Fuller. Such nanostructures -- a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter -- have of a number of emerging applications in medicine and nanotechnology.

The research by McCune and Chakraborty explores what happens to buckyballs when they are exposed to energy in a process called photoionization, in which light particles, or photons, strike carbon molecules and cause the ejection of one or more electrons. During photoionization, they found, the molecular surface along the inner wall of the buckyball liberates electrons at a lower rate than the molecular surface forming the outer wall.

More recent work by the two men involves endohedral fullerenes -- compounds created by sequestering an atom inside a buckyball. Scientists believe that by understanding and manipulating endohedral fullerenes, they will someday be able to pinpoint the delivery of drugs to diseased tissue and create ultra-miniature components for supercomputers small enough to fit inside a shirt pocket.

Chakraborty said he and McCune plan to present their findings at two major conferences in 2009: the annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, to be held this spring at the University of Virginia-Charlottesville, and the International Conference of Photonic, Electronic, and Atomic Collisions, set for late July at the University of Western Michigan in Kalamazoo.

Undergraduate research, like that being done by McCune, will be a key component in the development of Northwest’s new bachelor’s degree program in nanoscience, courses for which are scheduled to begin in spring 2009.

The program will take advantage of new laboratory and classroom facilities being incorporated into Northwest’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. When completed next year, the combination high-tech business incubator and academic facility will also house corporate tenants and the University’s newly formed Graduate Applied Research Center.

Chakraborty said the center will create even more opportunities for meaningful research and enhanced classroom experiences vital to the development of tomorrow’s scientists, engineers and technicians.

“It's one thing just to explain something from a textbook,” he said. “It's something else to walk in and say, ‘Now here's something we've just found that's really interesting.’”

For more information, please contact:

Anthony Brown,
News Bureau Manager
E-Mail: abrown@nwmissouri.edu
Phone: 660.562.1704
Fax: 660.562.1900

Northwest Missouri State University
219 Administration Building,
800 University Drive
Maryville, MO 64468

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