Features
(Photo: Richard Baker)Maria Alejandra Barrios Garcia has been interested in math and science for as long as she can remember.
“I would go crazy at the science fair. It was my favorite time of year,” recalls the third-year doctoral candidate in physics from Bogotá, Colombia.
These days her experiments use laser-driven shock waves to turn polymers and other materials into ionized matter at “one of the best places to be doing this type of research”–the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. Her work, which revolves around extreme temperatures and pressures in a field known as high-energy density physics, is used in the University’s collaboration with the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in northern California.
Considering a postdoctoral fellowship at a laboratory in Europe, Barrios Garcia is weighing whether to follow that with a research position at a national lab or a teaching job at a university. Last summer she received an award from the American Association of Physics Teachers for her work as a teaching assistant in two general physics classes for nonscience majors.
For now, she feels in exactly the right place, surrounded by resources that keep her on the cutting edge of inertial confinement fusion, a major branch of fusion energy research.
“There are a lot of senior scientists there who just focus on research, so you’re always in this environment of people who like what they do, which is very motivating to me,” she says. “And you get exposed to people who come here from other places to work. It gives you an advantage.”
