July 31, 2019
Past Scholarship Winner: Sam Pan
Menghsuan Sam Pan was awarded a Bernard Henry AIMCAL-SVC Scholarship in 2011 while he was an undergraduate student at M.I.T. He was studying Materials Science with Minors in Economics/Mathematics. Sam says “Receiving the scholarship served as an assurance that what I have done in the past has prepared me for the challenges to come. Leaving a high school without an emphasis in science education to go to MIT led me to doubt how I would fit into MIT, in which intense workloads and competitions is expected. The scholarship from the SVC Foundation, in a way, gave me confidence that the research project I did in high school is a good preparation for my studies in MIT and my career later in my life.”
He is currently a Ph.D. student studying Materials Science at M.I.T. with anticipated graduation later this year. His research focuses on electrochemical energy storage/battery, with a tentative thesis topic of “Aqueous Polysulfide Electrochemistry for Low-Cost Long-Duration Energy Storage”. The work is mostly experimental, in which he performs battery testing procedures and materials characterization on the battery materials of interest.
Along the way to graduation, Sam has had some opportunities to intern/extern at a variety of places: Rigaku Corporation, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Paderborn, and Form Energy. Through these experiences, he has learned new characterization techniques; such as XRD, SAXS, and XRF; along with different deposition and experimental techniques related to battery developments.
We wish Sam the best as he finishes his Ph.D. and can’t wait to see where life takes him.
