With CRANE, the Sky is the Limit
Alyssa Hayes is devoted to improving flawed systems.
Magnetic confinement fusion reactors contain hydrogen plasmas within rooms made of tungsten. Unfortunately, the highly energetic plasma can sputter tungsten atoms off the walls and into the reactor core.
“Each impurity that makes it into the core is a liability for energy loss,” said Hayes, a PhD student in the Department of Nuclear Engineering (NE). “We can use plasma modeling codes to understand the complex physics that dominate impurity erosion, redeposition, and transport under different circumstances.”
As a computational physicist in NE Department Head Brian Wirth’s lab and the Fusion Energy Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Hayes has spent her PhD applying a high-fidelity physics model to identify how to minimize tungsten contamination in the core of a magnetic confinement fusion reactor.
She has also been helping to build the Computational Research Access Network (CRANE), a free online program that provides computational plasma physics education to undergraduate and post-bachelor’s applicants from marginalized communities.
Hayes, a queer Filipina-American woman, has always been deeply involved in community action around both nuclear energy and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). She was one of 12 founding members of CRANE in 2021, and when the organization incorporated as a nonprofit earlier this year, she became the first chair of the Board of Directors.
“One of the many mantras in CRANE is that it’s by us, for us,” Hayes said. “Every board member identifies as coming from an underrepresented or marginalized background, whether they are disabled, LGBTQ+, belong to a racial minority, or some combination.”
Thanks to its comprehensive curriculum and commitment to student support, excitement around CRANE has grown rapidly. The program received 179 applications for its inaugural 2022 class; this fall, more than 400 applicants are vying to join the class of 2025.
“We have had students say that they successfully got into graduate school because of the skills that they developed in CRANE,” Hayes said.
Building CRANE
In 2021, Hayes was contacted by Ernesto Barraza-Valdez, who was building a team of physics graduate students who championed DEI to help address disparities in physics education.
Barraza-Valdez had found that although many nuclear fusion research opportunities—including universities, national laboratories, and federally funded programs—had published DEI statements supporting students from marginalized communities, they had not made significant progress toward improving the diversity of their participants.
“Diversity isn’t a thing you can do. It’s a metric that measures how you’re already doing,” Hayes said. “We know there’s not a lot of Black people or women in this field, and it’s probably not because they aren’t interested or smart enough to get in. There are systemic barriers that prevent people from certain backgrounds from accessing this field.”
For example, top-tier research institutions seek candidates who have hands-on technical skills like computational physics, but many minority-serving institutions only cover physics theory.
“Ernesto saw this gap in technical knowledge, but didn’t see a strong effort by these paid institutions to fill that gap,” Hayes recalled. “So, he was like, ‘We’ll just do it ourselves.’”
CRANE Takes Flight
In 2022, Barraza-Valdez, Hayes, and 10 other physics graduate students from across the country welcomed their first cohort to CRANE: a five-month curriculum that teaches students the basics of Python, then builds their coding skills through increasingly advanced math and physics applications. Students can also elect to learn skills used by professional physics researchers, like Bash, Git and GitHub, and LaTeX.
In the last month of the program, students can choose from six concurrent tracks taught by CRANE leaders who specialize in each topic. The teaching staff includes physicists in a wide range of careers and levels—upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, early career researchers, and post-masters and post-baccalaureate professionals—and the tracks reflect their varied professional experiences.
Hayes co-developed and co-teaches the track on Monte Carlo methods, which use repeated random sampling to predict numerical results—and which she employs in her PhD research to model impurity erosion, redeposition, and transport.
“This is where the real physics part happens,” Hayes said. “Now they’ve developed a lot of skills and we’re putting it all together.”
Equally important to the classes themselves is the supportive environment at CRANE’s foundation, which Hayes says is critical for a subject as intimidating as computational physics.
“The most common feedback we’ve gotten from students is that not only did CRANE help them build their technical skills, but we helped them do it in a place that felt safe,” Hayes said. “Here, we teach that writing code that doesn’t work is not a failure; it is the first step to writing code that does work.”
Taking CRANE to the Next Level
As CRANE expands, Hayes hopes that the mentorship network will also become more robust.
Hayes meets individually with her three mentees every two weeks to discuss their career goals, obstacles they anticipate, and how to overcome those obstacles. She also guides them in soft skills like sending cold emails to potential graduate advisors.
Unfortunately, the leadership is too small to provide that high-quality mentorship to all of CRANE’s students.
“We want to provide one-on-one professional development to more students,” Hayes said. “We’re trying to get more mentors from lots of different institutions to come in.”
Physicists at the third-year undergraduate level and above, from any background, physics specialty, or demographic, are encouraged to apply to become CRANE mentors—helping future physics students ascend to new heights.
Contact
Izzie Gall (865-974-7203, egall4@utk.edu)