April 04, 2019

Matson receives Graduate Research Fellowship

Thomas Matson, MSE PhD candidate has received a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

Thomas is currently a senior, majoring in materials science and engineering, with a minor in computer science and engineering. In Spring of 2017, he received a fellowship from the Semiconductor Research Corporation to work with Professor Marek Skowronski to study the memory and threshold switching behaviors of resistive random access memory devices, to be used in next generation computer memory. The following spring, in 2018, he worked with Professor Elizabeth Holm, using molecular dynamics simulations to analyze the thermal stability of copper-niobium nanolaminates. Following through the summer he became a NextGen Fellow with Citrine Informatics, and again worked with Professor Holm to use computer vision and machine learning to measure grain size from microstructure data. More recently, Thomas applied similar techniques as part of his senior Capstone project, working with Professor Holm and Dr. Chen Wang of NIOSH (The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) to classify carbon nanotube structures from TEM data. Thomas plans to continue with Professor Holm's group to continue the work from the NextGen fellowship. In addition to his studies, Thomas has served as a resident assistance in upperclassmen housing on campus for the past two years. He will be joining the PhD-track graduate program at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) at MIT this fall 2019 and plans to continue pursuing computational materials research.