Video Transcript – Student Research Highlights – Ellie Schlake

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My name is Ellie Schlake. I am a senior at Boise State University. I am pursuing a degree in electrical engineering with a minor in applied mathematics. I’m also in the accelerated master’s program doing a masters in electrical computer engineering.

I’m researching laser sintering of printed films so for printed circuit boards when the metal ink is deposited on the printed circuit board it’s not conductive and so this technique helps to sinter those particles to make a conductive line, whereas like usually it’s heat treatment or chemically sintered. The laser sintering is just another technique to do that. Laser sintering can be done in a closed chamber that does not have any oxygen so it prevents oxidation of those printed circuit boards and also there could be components on printed circuit boards that could be damaged by heat treatment or other techniques and so laser sintering you can choose where you want the sintering to occur instead of like the whole board being like placed in an oven for example.

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What I love most about research and what I’m doing right now is kind of the freedom of it. It is a lot different than like school work where you’re given assignments and you kind of just know, like this is my task, do it by this time. Both research it’s very open-ended, it’s very independent, and there’s a lot of freedom to it which can be very difficult but at the same time it’s really rewarding once you get the job done.

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