Rebecca Beadling, a junior majoring in chemistry and biology, won the 2012 Chung Soo Yoo Award for outstanding graduate-level research presentation at the annual Pittsburgh Diffraction Conference, held at the Stanford Linear Accelerator National Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif.
This year's conference covered some of the latest developments in the field, including advances in protein crystallography and research associated with the free electron laser, an x-ray research tool.
Beadling won the award for her poster, “A Neutron Diffraction Investigation of the Solid-Solution Na2(Zn, Co)SiO4.”
The poster session included representatives from IUP, the University of Michigan, the University of California Berkeley, the University of California Davis, the University of California Irvine, Colorado State University, and Stanford University.
“Not only was I the only undergraduate student at the conference, I was the only student from a small, non-Ph.D. graduate institution,” said Beadling. IUP does not offer doctoral programs in chemistry and biology.
Beadling's adviser is chemistry professor Charles Lake.
“Rebecca was in competition with very strong Ph.D. graduate students,” he said. “She demonstrated that IUP students can compete at a high level in the sciences.”
Beadling is a Provost Scholar at IUP and the recipient of the 2012 recipient of the Patricia Hilliard Robertson Memorial Scholarship, the Dean's Opportunity Scholarship, and the Scholarship for Creating Opportunities in Applied Mathematics.
In addition to her chemistry research, Beadling is conducting research in biology to explore the effects of copper as a stressor in the life history and physiological characteristics of multiple generations of zebrafish.
The Pittsburgh Diffraction Society sponsors the annual international conference, holding it in Pittsburgh every other year. The society is a not-for-profit organization that promotes fundamental and applied diffraction and crystallographic research and the exchange of ideas and information concerning such research.