LLNL internship sets chemistry student on the right PATH

Internships at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) provide graduate students with hands-on research experience that they can bring back to their home institutions, applying their newfound skillsets to their PhD work.

Since interning for LLNL’s Glenn T. Seaborg Institute in 2023, Zachary Murphy, a PhD student at the University of Central Florida (UCF), has gone on to earn a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Program Award for Technical and Higher-Education (PATH).

The PATH scholarship is awarded to graduate students in STEM disciplines that support the critical needs of the Nuclear Security Enterprise. With this scholarship, students at minority serving institutions, like UCF, receive financial support, get to connect with other NNSA MSI professionals, and have the opportunity to explore potential career paths within the NNSA and NSE.

Both Murphy’s PhD research and LLNL internship relate to nuclear waste management, just from different perspectives. At LLNL, he focused heavily on the interactions between radionuclides and underground samples from a potential nuclear waste repository, delving into different aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, in particular, nuclear waste storage and potential radionuclide migration in the environment.

Back at UCF, Murphy will utilize his scholarship to continue studying different uranium minerals relevant to the nuclear fuel cycle as a part of his PhD thesis. He is specifically studying studtite, a uranium peroxide mineral known to form in nuclear waste, and how its stability is affected by other organic or inorganic molecules that are present in the environment or in the waste itself. Murphy said, “This work helps understand the various types of uranium that are present in nuclear waste, which can aid in the development of remediation strategies in the event radionuclides were to migrate into the environment over time.”

“My LLNL internship really helped enhance my analytical skills, which I’ve been able to apply to my PhD work,” Murphy added. “It also inspired me to look into analytical techniques and instrumentation that I hadn’t originally considered utilizing in my own research but ended up being very helpful.”

Murphy gives a special thanks to his LLNL mentor Gauthier Deblonde, who has been a driving force in his post-internship success.