Hughes Fellowship: Student Stories

In the past year, the Hughes Fellowship has supported five physics students at the University of Arkansas. Harry O'Mara, Luis Enrique Rosas Hernandaz, Sachini Withanage, Hemanta Pradhan and James Mangum have shared what they have been able to accomplish with the support of the Hughes family in the following testimonials.

Harry O'Mara

Summer 2025

"The Hughes Fellowship allowed me to focus exclusively on research during the summer between the fourth and fifth year of my Ph.D. Having just finished the last course I needed for my degree, my mind shifted from being a student to being a researcher, and the fellowship offered me a unique opportunity to make that my sole focus.

My dissertation research is preparing for the next generation gravitational wave observatory, LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), and the swaths of information it will gather after launching in the late 2030's. Einstein's general relativity tells us that space and time become spacetime within which objects and events in the universe are embedded. Spacetime can be compared to the surface of a body of water. Waves in the water are ripples that propagate through the water, and gravitational waves are much in the same, ripples rolling across spacetime. We can detect these ripples using some clever techniques involving laser light, wherein if one of these ripples passes by our detector, it will cause a delay in how long a pulse of that laser light should take to travel between two points. This is much like how if we tried to row a boat into choppy water as compared to calm water, so LISA is measuring the length of a pulse of laser light's journey over a rough ocean. Additionally, gravitational wave detectors are not like conventional telescopes. We do not get to decide what we are looking at by pointing at some small area of the sky. Gravitational waves are more akin to hearing. Our ears do not get to choose what they hear.

My work this past summer has gone toward developing software aimed at the task of disentangling all of the different kinds of ripples we expect to hear with LISA. The Hughes Fellowship, in addition to helping me start the research for my dissertation, also afforded me the opportunity to attend a two-week summer school at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where I learned a tremendous amount and made some great friends. It was some of the best fun I have had in my five years as a graduate student, and I am grateful to the Hughes family for supporting my journey."

Luis Enrique Rosas-Hernandez

Summer 2025

"The Hughes Fellowship provided essential support during summer 2025, allowing me to focus entirely on research during my fourth year as a Ph.D. student in physics. By removing the need to seek additional funding, the fellowship gave me uninterrupted time to make significant progress on my dissertation research.

My primary project focused on the nonlinear optical response of twisted bilayers of hexagonal boron nitride, a two-dimensional material of interest for future photonic applications. This work aimed to better understand experimental observations that could not be fully explained by existing theoretical models. During the summer, I advanced this project through detailed theoretical analysis and computational modeling.

In parallel, I worked on the development of computational tools for calculating second-order optical responses in bulk materials, contributing to a broader and more flexible research framework for studying nonlinear optical phenomena.

The results from my work on twisted boron nitride bilayers were presented as a poster at the 26th International Conference on Electronic Properties of 2D Systems and the 22nd International Conference on Modulated Semiconductor Structures. Photos included show my poster presentation and selected visualizations from the research.

Overall, the Hughes Fellowship played a key role in supporting my research progress, professional development and participation in the international scientific community."

Sachini Withanage

Summer 2025

"The Hughes Fellowship provided critical support during summer 2025, allowing me to devote uninterrupted time to my Ph.D. research in experimental biophysics. This was the first time in my graduate career that I was able to focus entirely on research without balancing teaching assignments. While I greatly value teaching physics, the time and energy it requires can limit the depth of sustained research progress. The fellowship removed these financial constraints and created a rare opportunity for focused scientific work.

With this support, I advanced my dissertation research, which investigates protein shape, stability and electrical dipole moments using solid-state nanopores alongside dynamic light scattering and electrophoretic light scattering techniques. During the fellowship period, I conducted extensive experimental measurements and in-depth data analysis on protein systems under varying environmental conditions, including changes in pH, temperature and applied electric fields.

This dedicated research time was especially valuable for refining data analysis models, improving computational fitting methods and validating experimental trends across multiple datasets. The progress made over the summer significantly strengthened the core results of my dissertation and contributed directly to a manuscript that is currently in preparation.

Importantly, the work supported by the Hughes Fellowship led to my selection for an oral presentation at the APS March Meeting 2026, one of the largest international conferences in physics. At this meeting, I will present my findings on protein shape and dipole moment characterization at the single-molecule level. This opportunity represents a major professional milestone and an important step in sharing my research with the broader scientific community."

Hemanta Pradhan

Fall 2025

"I was awarded the Ray Hughes Graduate Fellowship during the fall 2025 semester. This support proved to be instrumental in my doctoral research, allowing me to focus solely on my research project. During this period, I developed a custom scientific device capable of running automated biological experiments.

Traditionally, cellular growth and motility studies are labor-intensive, requiring manual supervision and measurements every several hours, which makes it challenging and inconsistent to perform long-term studies at higher temporal resolutions. Microalgae are sensitive indicators of environmental stress, so studying their response behavior in terms of growth and motility provides valuable insights for ecological and toxicity studies. My research project aims to overcome such challenges by developing a device capable of running these experiments autonomously.

During the Hughes Fellowship semester, I built an automated device named AGAMAI (Automated Growth and Motility Analysis Imaging Device), an automated imaging platform featured to study the response of microalgae to environmental stresses in terms of growth and motility. I successfully assembled all the hardware and tested each hardware module for the device. Additionally, I developed Python-based software with a custom graphical user interface for controlling the hardware modules, running the experiments, monitoring system status, carrying out analysis and displaying experimental results.

The Hughes Fellowship was invaluable in supporting my work, allowing me more time to dedicate to the development of this project. The device is currently ready to perform innovative, long-term studies on microalgal responses to various drugs and nanomaterials. I am sincerely grateful for the support that facilitated me to turn the research concept into a working platform, which is one of the core parts of my Ph.D. work."

James "Jim" Mangum

Spring 2026

"The fellowship is critical this semester. I am usually a TA. However, a combination of preparing to graduate, updating the Physics for Architects l and II lab manuals and working on four new publications makes being a TA untenable. This fellowship will allow me to wrap my work up neatly before leaving the university to become an assistant professor. I don't know where I will end up, but having this fellowship makes it easier for me to assure all my ducks are in a row before leaving." 

While Mangum has yet to utilize the Hughes Fellowship, he has shared below the research that he will expand upon in spring of 2026:

"Graphene is an atomically thin sheet of carbon. It is very hard, with the highest ultimate tensile strength of any known substance, as well as among the highest Young's moduli. It is also highly conductive. Additionally, when a sheet is freestanding, it spontaneously forms ripples. Fluctuations of atoms cause these ripples to vibrate and occasionally invert. I ran a series of molecular dynamics simulations of single freestanding ripples of graphene and observed these inversions. 

This process of inversion happens constantly at nonzero temperatures. I used tools such as Fourier analysis, Kramers' rate and velocity probability distributions to understand how temperature and compressive strain affect ripple dynamics. We are currently incorporating freestanding sheets of graphene into devices that harvest energy from their motion."