Awards

"Pipeline Visuality: James Hamilton’s Burning Oil Well at Night and Petro-colonial Rupture, ca. 1859"

Advisor: Dr. Alan Braddock

The rise of oil in the twentieth century was propelled by claims that it provided less labor-intensive methods of extraction and more efficient means of transport than its hydrocarbon cousin, coal. Yet in nineteenth-century depictions of the oil industry, there’s a conspicuous absence: that of the pipeline. While these technologies, albeit sometimes in infant forms like dug trenches and wooden chutes, were an industry presence practically from oil’s modern discovery in 1859, the overriding theme of oil pictures of the era was one of mess. Paintings like James Hamilton’s Burning Oil Well at Night (SAAM, 1861) with its spewing fiery geyser of oil tends to read today like an image of petrochemical disaster. It was that, but it was also so routine that contemporaneous accounts of the event depicted were more fascinated with the visual spectacle than outraged over the mismanagement that caused it. Decidedly unspectacular, petroleum pipelines nonetheless similarly mask spills in the subterranean and hide the poisonous and combustive properties of carbon within gleaming cylindrical surfaces. In this paper, I treat pipelines themselves as methodology, adapting their ubiquitous spatial logic to methods of close visual analysis and primary and secondary source research to approach the oil industry’s pervasive weddedness to American landscape art. By bringing deserved intimacy to the 1861 Rouseville oil well fire, the subject of Hamilton’s painting and an environmental history overshadowed by the onset of the Civil War, I reanimate the violences of petro-colonialism.

Morgan Brittain is a PhD candidate in American Studies. He holds an MA in Art History and a BA in Political Science, both from the University of Iowa. His research draws from visual studies and the environmental humanities, and his writing has appeared in Panorama, Sequitur, and H-Environment. His work has been supported by William & Mary, Gilcrease Museum, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, among others.

"Oyster Shell Structure Impacts Survival of Soft-Shell Clams (Mya arenaria)"

Advisor: Dr. Rochelle Seitz

Mya arenaria is a filter-feeding clam that can improve the water quality of its habitat and is preyed upon by important species, such as blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus), in Chesapeake Bay. Predation is a key factor affecting juvenile survival and year class success, which can dictate M. arenaria populations for many years. Due to their thin shells, M. arenaria must rely on deep burial and low densities to avoid predation. Evidence suggests that increased habitat complexity, such as oyster shell, may provide a refuge from predation. Though there is promising evidence that increased habitat complexity can support a high-density refuge from predation for M. arenaria, there has been little field research investigating this. In this study, we answer the question: to what degree does the structural complexity of oyster shell hash, as would be found on the fringes of oyster reefs, increase survival of M. arenaria? To answer this question, we conducted predator-exclusion experiments with the crossed factors of caging type and oyster shell structure. At each of three sites across both shores of the York River, we deployed 12 replicates of fully caged and uncaged plots planted with 20 juvenile clams (18.32 ± 1.85 mm shell length). Half of the cages received oyster shell layered within the sediment, whereas half did not. After four days, we collected the contents of the cages to quantify clam survival. Preliminary results suggest that shell structure can increase survival of M. arenaria, but there is a minimum density of oyster shell required to provide refuge from predation.

Jordan Ferré is a second year MS bypass student at the Batten School of Coastal and Marine Science at VIMS. Her research interests include marine restoration and conservation ecology. Her thesis addresses population dynamics and predator interactions of the soft-shell clam (Mya arenaria) in the York River Estuary. She holds a BS in Earth Systems from Stanford University.

"GUERNICA: New Continuum Kinetic Neutral Code Validation & Verification"

Advisor: Dr. Saskia Mordijck

To model fueling and heat flux mitigation in future fusion power plants, new computational approaches are needed as current models struggle to scale to the extreme conditions expected in these devices. Fusion takes place in magnetically confined plasmas, more than 10 times hotter than the Sun, and maintaining stable operation requires a delicate balance between fueling efficiency and protecting the reactor walls from excessive heat. Neutral atoms and molecules play a central role in this balance, providing fuel for fusion reactions and helping cool the boundary region. Existing models, such as those based on Monte Carlo methods, can capture these processes in detail but often suffer from statistical noise and high computational cost in high-density or reactor-scale regimes. To address these challenges, we introduce GUERNICA, a new continuum kinetic code that models the behavior of neutral particles using a deterministic approach rather than random sampling. GUERNICA combines the discontinuous Galerkin method in configuration space and the discrete velocity method in velocity space, achieving high-order accuracy and excellent scalability on modern high performance computing architectures. It captures key interactions such as charge exchange, ionization and neutral-neutral collisions. Recent tests demonstrate strong agreement with analytic theory and established Monte Carlo benchmarks, establishing GUERNICA as a promising tool for predictive, noise-free modeling of plasma–neutral interactions in next-generation fusion reactors.

Jack Gabriel is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Physics at William & Mary. His research focuses on computational plasma physics for fusion energy. For his dissertation, he is developing a new numerical code to study plasma–neutral gas interactions, which play a critical role in fueling and edge physics in fusion devices.