Gabrielle Ledoux came to MIT as a freshman in 2012 with a longtime interest in materials science, and a passion for research and discovery — a combination that’s finding fulfillment at MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering, where her participation in a series of investigations has led to a dual major and a Summer 2013 project that Ledoux calls “a perfect intersection of all my interests.”
Any undergraduate with wide-ranging curiosity is apt to feel challenged by the need to declare a major, and Ledoux was no exception. The daughter of an MIT Physics alum and former associate professor (Bob Ledoux ’78, Ph.D. ’81), Ledoux got her first taste of Institute life during the summer between her junior and senior years in high school. That's when she sent an email inquiry that led to an internship with NSE Senior Research Scientist Richard Lanza, in which she helped analyze orbit properties on an ultra-compact superconducting cyclotron and co-authored a resulting paper.
After her acceptance to the class of 2016, she spent the summer of 2012 working with NSE doctoral student Zach Hartwig on development of data acquisition software for a groundbreaking materials-diagnostic system used in MIT’s tokamak fusion reactor, part of a larger project headed by Prof. Dennis Whyte. Ledoux continued her work with Whyte and Hartwig through an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project during her freshman year, and then went on to another UROP with NSE Assistant Prof. Michael Short during the summer of 2013.
“I had been set on declaring Course 3 [Materials Science and Engineering], but the UROPs really helped me make up my mind to declare a dual major with Course 22 [Nuclear Science and Engineering],” Ledoux says. “Like a lot of people, I was concerned about jobs and opportunities in the nuclear field, but NSE was really great about helping me build a course of study around what I was interested in. They listened to what I wanted to do, and connected me with Mike Short, who’s done something very similar.”
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Any undergraduate with wide-ranging curiosity is apt to feel challenged by the need to declare a major, and Ledoux was no exception. The daughter of an MIT Physics alum and former associate professor (Bob Ledoux ’78, Ph.D. ’81), Ledoux got her first taste of Institute life during the summer between her junior and senior years in high school. That's when she sent an email inquiry that led to an internship with NSE Senior Research Scientist Richard Lanza, in which she helped analyze orbit properties on an ultra-compact superconducting cyclotron and co-authored a resulting paper.
After her acceptance to the class of 2016, she spent the summer of 2012 working with NSE doctoral student Zach Hartwig on development of data acquisition software for a groundbreaking materials-diagnostic system used in MIT’s tokamak fusion reactor, part of a larger project headed by Prof. Dennis Whyte. Ledoux continued her work with Whyte and Hartwig through an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project during her freshman year, and then went on to another UROP with NSE Assistant Prof. Michael Short during the summer of 2013.
“I had been set on declaring Course 3 [Materials Science and Engineering], but the UROPs really helped me make up my mind to declare a dual major with Course 22 [Nuclear Science and Engineering],” Ledoux says. “Like a lot of people, I was concerned about jobs and opportunities in the nuclear field, but NSE was really great about helping me build a course of study around what I was interested in. They listened to what I wanted to do, and connected me with Mike Short, who’s done something very similar.”
Read the full article
