Dartmouth students have an unparalleled range of opportunities to conduct funded, independent research at the university level. Becoming engaged in these programs can change the trajectory of your studies at Dartmouth and prepare you for graduate school.

Your independent research work will be intellectually challenging, while developing your creativity, giving you new technical skillsets, and propelling your career post-graduation. DO NOT underestimate your contribution to large scale research projects. Dartmouth undergraduates' research work has produced papers in renowned scientific journals, presentations at leading international conferences, as well as scores of valuable patents.

The following projects are available in the SENSE Lab for highly-motivated undergraduates with strong scientific curiosity and a healthy interest in design:

Energy-efficient wireless charging could dramatically alter the way we deploy the wireless devices that make up the global Internet of Things. There is a HUGE technological motivation to break out of the limitations of current cm-range inductively-coupled wireless charging, but new approaches and innovation are needed.

This project will explore the fundamental physics of phosphorescent energy storage for enabling remote photonic wireless charging. We will design novel, nanostructured SrAl2O4 photon battery materials and characterize their ability to store high intensity optical power and distribute this energy to next-generation, high-efficiency solar cells. This work will model the physics of long-range photonic charging and characterize the external quantum efficiency of the optoelectronic system. This information will inform the circuit design and prototyping of a photon-battery powered wireless transceiver.

This project will include an active collaboration with San Francisco-based energy startup, Nimbus Engineering.

Students from all STEM fields (Physics, Engineering, Chemistry, etc.) are welcome to apply. Prior course-based or laboratory experience with optics, semiconductors, or wireless circuits is ideal.

Students will develop experience with optoelectronic material and device characterization, as well as basic embedded system programming.

Interested candidates are welcome to contact Dr. Scheideler (william.j.scheideler@dartmouth.edu) with a CV and 2-3 sentence statement about their interest in the project.

Wearable electronics is poised to fundamentally change how we interact and communicate, as well as the way health care and medicine work. However, there are challenges for engineering devices that can be conformable and wearable. Flexible electronics must be fabricated at low temperatures and be able to withstand intense bending stresses. Nanomaterials are a promising solution to these challenges, but advanced methods are needed to achieve ideal electronic properties from nanomaterial precursors.

Cold plasmas are a new strategy for low-temperature synthesis that could offer a great opportunity for conductive nanomaterial integration in wearable electronic systems. We are developing flexible circuits using cold-plasmas to rapidly synthesize metal nanoparticle conductors. This work will explore how atmospheric pressure plasmas can initiate sintering, control interfacial chemistry, and engineer the electronic properties of nanomaterials. This information will inform the fabrication of wearable circuits integrating sensors with wireless communication.

Students from all STEM fields (Computer Science, Physics, Engineering, Chemistry, etc.) are welcome to apply. This is a hands on project; students with scientific curiosity who enjoy experimental work will be a great fit for this project. Students will develop experience with nanomaterials and electronics, as well as Scanning Electron Microscopy.

Interested candidates are welcome to contact Dr. Scheideler (william.j.scheideler@dartmouth.edu) with a CV and 2-3 sentence statement about their interest in the project.

Transistors are the nano-scale foundation of modern information technology, forming the processing power behind traditional von Neumann computing in your phones and PCs. But new challenges in deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning demand hardware that scales with big data. Neuromorphic computing is a game-changing bio-inspired approach that mimics the parallel synaptic computing of the brain to achieve faster, energy-efficient implementations of ML.

The SENSE lab is developing metal oxide transistors for neuromorphic computing. This project will involve fabrication of low-voltage metal oxide transistors utilizing atomic layer deposition, a high-precision nanomanufacturing method that controls material composition one-layer of atoms at a time.

This project will design coplanar gate metal oxide transistors and characterize the physical limits of ionic gating of complex transparent conducting oxides exhibiting 2D Electron Gas phenomena and metal-insulator transitions.

Students will learn fundamentals of semiconductor device characterization and solid state physics.

Interested candidates are welcome to contact Dr. Scheideler (william.j.scheideler@dartmouth.edu) with a CV and 2-3 sentence statement about their interest in the project.