As a third grader, Tahira Reid Smith ’00, ’04, Ph.D., was already thinking like an inventor. So, when her school, PS 97 in the Bronx, New York, held a poster contest where students were asked to depict something each of them wished he or she had, she didn’t draw a typical childhood fantasy. She designed a machine.
On April 26, seven Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute undergraduate students showcased research projects in the areas of materials science, computer modeling, chemical engineering, and more at a symposium held at Corning’s Sullivan Park Science & Technology Center just outside of Corning, New York.
In a paper published in Applied Physics Reviews, a group of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, pointing to four underlying causes of fluctuations that span materials, argue that so-called "stochasticity" is inherent to all materials and merits greater exploration as a field of study.