Jake Spisak Awarded Outstanding Undergraduate Poster at 2016 APS DPP Conference

November 5, 2016

Jake Spisak was the receipient of an Outstanding Undergraduate Poster award at the 2016 APS DPP Conference, for his poster entitiled "Hybrid Particle-In-Cell Simulations of Weakly Collisional Shock Formation". Spisak's poster discussed simulations he performed on colliding plasma flows, as motivated by the desire to understand the plasma shock formed in an experiment conducted by Julio Valenzuela at UC San Diego; which studied plasma shock formation as it pertains to astrophysical plasma jets.

Jake is currently an undergraduate student at Rice University and worked as a researcher for the Center for Energy Research over the summer of 2016.

The 2016 American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics (APS DPP) Conference was held in San Jose, California from October 31 to November 4. The Scientific Program for this annual meeting offered nine half-day sessions of invited, review, tutorial, and contributed papers; covering basic plasma physics, beams and coherent radiation, inertial confinement and high energy density plasmas, magnetic confinement, plasma technology and low temperature plasmas, space and astrophysical plasmas, education and outreach, and high-school and undergraduate research.