March 4, 2015 – Boise State undergraduate alumnus and current MSE Ph.D. student, Steve Letourneau, points to an atomic force microscope (AFM) image of an array of close-packed nanoscale spheres. A future engineer sits in the driver’s seat and watches the image build in real-time as the surface is scanned by a Bruker Dimension Icon FastScan AFM.
The Surface Science Laboratory, staffed by undergraduate and graduate engineering students, hosted over a hundred visitors during STEM Exploration Day this past February. STEM Exploration Day is an all day event organized by the College of Engineering to showcase research and teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) at Boise State. Thousands of students, parents, and community members visit the university and participate in a wide variety of hands-on demonstrations and activities. In the Surface Science Lab, students and staff displayed examples of cutting edge research in materials characterization using the latest atomic force and scanning electron microscopes from Bruker and PhenomWorld. Visitors learned about research in DNA-based materials, magnetic shape memory alloys, phase change memory materials, magnesium alloys, photonic crystals and more.