Brandon Peplinski award-winning talk on lithium spectroscopy

Bethel University Physics major Brandon Peplinski won the Best Student Presentation Award on 30 April 2011 at the Minnesota section of the American Association of Physics Teachers meeting at Saint Mary’s University in Winona, MN. A faculty judge described Brandon’s presentation to Dr. Chad Hoyt, Brandon’s research advisor at BU, in the following note: “We were frankly impressed with his ability, his level of comfort making the presentation, and his broad-based understanding of the various pieces of the project ... he did a great job.”

Brandon described work on dual-laser beam spectroscopy of lithium in Bethel’s AMO (atomic, molecular and optical) physics laboratory as directed by Dr. Hoyt, Associate Professor of Physics at Bethel. In addition to Hoyt, Brandon’s co-authors included BU students Jack Houlton, Lauren Otto, Daniel Klemme and Professor of Physics Thomas Greenlee. Another Bethel physics faculty member, Dr. Keith Stein, collaborated on the results presented at the conference. Related work was presented almost simultaneously by Jack Houlton at the 2011 National Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in Anaheim, CA, for which it was awarded the national first prize for “Outstanding Presentation of Undergraduate Research.” This work with undergraduate majors in physics and applied physics has been supported by continuing funding from the Minnesota NASA Space Grant Consortium and CID, Inc. 

Brandon Peplinski graduated with a B.S. in Physics from Bethel University in May 2011. Brandon has accepted an offer to join the Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota with full funding.