Congratulations to rising senior and chemical engineering undergraduate Julia Kubes for her induction into the University of Rochester’s chapter of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society and for her recent achievement of being one of 18 juniors invited to join the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honor society.

In addition to this honor, Julia was the recipient of the Donald F. Othmer Sophomore Excellence Award, given to the junior chemical engineering student with the highest scholastic GPA for the first two years of study, and the Albert K. Ackoff Award, given to the top third-year chemical engineering student. As part of her studies, Julia works at LLE under Senior Research Engineer Ken Marshall. Her research employs computational chemistry modeling to study and predict the effects of high-intensity, short-pulse lasers on the electron density distribution in liquid crystal materials such as those used as passive optical elements on OMEGA. Julia’s work will be presented as an invited paper at the 2024 SPIE Optics and Photonics Liquid Crystals XXVIII symposium this coming August.