Frances completed her B.S. in Chemistry and B.A. in English at Florida International University in 2019. During her undergraduate tenure, she received two fellowships, the Department of Energy Environmental Management (DOE-EM) fellowship and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Fellowship. As a dual fellow, her undergraduate research under Dr. Hilary Emerson focused on laboratory experiments to update risk assessment models on the behavior of the actinide series elements under high ionic strength conditions relevant to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Afterwards, she went on to University of Notre Dame to pursue a Ph.D. in both Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences (CEEES) and Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) departments as a Nuclear Energy University Program Fellow (NEUP) in 2020. Her graduate research under Dr. Amy Hixon focused on the environmental chemistry of plutonium, where she studied the sorption processes of plutonium on iron oxide mineral nanoparticles as a function of crystallite size. After completing her Ph.D. in 2024, she started her postdoctoral studies in the Darleane C. Hoffman Postdoctoral Fellowship program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Currently, she is working under Dr. Jennifer Wacker and Dr. Vassilia Zorba in developing preconcentration techniques to improve actinide detection sensitivity as well as obtaining molecular spectroscopic signatures of protactinium for nonproliferation applications.
