HOFFMAN FELLOWS

Appie attended the University of Missouri – Kansas City on full academic scholarship where she received her B.S. in Chemistry and B.F.A. in Dance Performance. Her undergraduate research with Prof. Xiaobo Chen focused on synthesizing nanomaterials to study photocatalytic hydrogen generation. Appie danced professionally with local Kansas City companies, and later with the San Diego Ballet. She completed her Ph.D. in Dec. 2021 at Washington University in St. Louis in the lab of Prof. Bill Tolman, funded through the NSF-CCI Center for Sustainable Polymers, which focused on mechanistic studies of Aluminum catalysts in stereoselective ring-opening polymerizations. She joined the Glenn T. Seaborg Center under the co-advisement of Dr. Stefan Minasian and Prof. Rebecca Abergel at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher in 2022, focusing on the preparation of actinide dioxides from molecular precursors as well as transuranic separations and purifications. She is excited to join the NextGen Program as a Darleane C. Hoffman Postdoctoral Fellow under the guidance of Prof. Rebecca Abergel and develop materials with precise spectroscopic signatures towards the efforts of nuclear forensics and nonproliferation.

Olivia received her B.S. in chemistry from Brandeis University in 2016 where she performed undergraduate research under Dr. Casey Wade (OSU) on the design and synthesis of pyrazolate-based metal organic frameworks. She completed her Ph.D. with Prof. Oleg V. Ozerov at Texas A&M University where she studied the chemistry of highly Lewis acidic cations coupled with halogenated carborane anions for hydrodefluorination. As a postdoc, she worked with Dr. Stefan Minasian using soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and microscopy to understand metal-ligand interactions in f-element organometallics with C K-edge XAS. She is currently working under the advice of David K. Shuh as a Hoffman Postdoctoral Fellow using radiochemical synthesis and X-ray spectromicroscopy techniques to characterize and better understand the reactivity of material signatures in the environment.

Ryan completed his B. A. in Physics and in Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. As an undergraduate, he conducted research on transition edge sensors for detection of neutrinoless double beta decay with the experiment CUPID. During his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, he studied the direct detection of dark matter using noble gases. His work with the LZ experiment, a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber, helped to establish unprecedented dark matter sensitivity. He also investigated superfluid helium as a detection medium for low mass dark matter. In 2021, Ryan became a fellow of the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium, which supported the remainder of his Ph.D. With this support, Ryan built a prototype neutron detector based on scintillation of pressurized helium gas with silicon photomultiplier read-out. Ryan looks forward to researching spin systems for quantum sensing with Prof. Ashok Ajoy as a Hoffman Postdoctoral Fellow.

Veronica C. Bradley earned a PhD in Radiochemistry from the University of Missouri (2022) working under Dr. John Brockman, where she focused on rapid analysis techniques for nuclear forensics applications. She completed a postdoctoral appointment at Oak Ridge National Lab where she focused on novel sampling systems for ICP-MS analysis.