Dr. Alison Saunders

Alison Saunders is an experimental physicist working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She graduated from Reed College with a Bachelor of Arts in physics, and went on to attain a Ph.D. in the subject from the University of California. Her research focuses on high power laser experiments measuring the conditions of dynamically compressed high energy density materials. This includes things such as radiation transport modeling, particle accelerator operations, and molecular dynamics modeling. One of her recent publications looks at how microjets are afster than speeding bullet which has implications in spacecraft shielding and planetary impacts. Another of her recent publications looks at ejecta interactions with regards to high power lasers rather than high explosive or gas gun sources. While these studies were a lot more complicated than the physics we were dealing with this semester I thought that the idea of particle accelerators and high impact collisions seemed really cool to study. 

Sources: 

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0028147

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/12.0000816