Utah State University physicist Jenny Whiteley’s Northern Utah home has recently given her and her family occasional glimpses of colorful auroras in the night sky.
“We’ve seen vibrant greens and purples, with moving, vertical white shafts of light,” says Whiteley, a doctoral student in USU’s Department of Physics. “It was fascinating to see the electrons trace out magnetic field lines above the Earth, which are always there but only visible under certain — and in our location — rare conditions.”
The ability to explain physical phenomena following mathematical logic is what attracts Whiteley to the study of physics.
“It’s amazing to me that mathematical expressions can be constructed to successfully replicate the physical behavior we see around us,” she says.
Whiteley, who is one of five USU graduate students selected this time last year for a 2024-2025 Utah NASA Space Grant Consortium Fellowship Award, is studying radiation-induced conductivity in the Materials Physics Group led by USU physics professor J.R. Dennison.
The lab’s team members perform ground-based testing of electrical charging and electron transport properties of both conducting and insulating materials, emphasizing studies of electron emission, conductivity, luminescence and electrostatic discharge.
The lab’s research is supported by NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and private aerospace companies.
“Among the topics studied in Dr. Dennison’s lab is how various materials behave in response to harsh conditions, such as space,” Whiteley says.
The space community, she notes, is highly focused on hazards posed to spacecraft and aircraft by static electricity, radiation and extreme temperatures.
Whiteley, who earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from USU, in 2021 and 2023, respectively, has spent much of the past year analyzing data from Idaho State University’s Idaho Accelerator Center (IAC) in Pocatello collected by previous group members.
“Dr. Dennison and his students have studied how to measure conductivity in highly insulating materials, such as polymers used in spacecraft,” she says.
Whiteley is preparing to conduct tests similar to those at the IAC, using much smaller and more compact instrumentation, here at Utah State.
“The USU Materials Physics Group now has instrumentation that can test radiation-induced conductivity in materials accurately and efficiently at a lower cost than the previously used method,” she says.
“Working with the new instrumentation will be fun,” Whiteley says. “I am looking forward to the hands-on aspects of this work, where we’ll set up experiments and determine how to collect data.”
The materials she and group members are testing, she points out, are insulators.
“By definition, they don’t conduct,” Whiteley says. “But because of the atomic level interaction between the radiation and the material, we sometimes get a surprise: conductivity. It is important to quantify this behavior to those choosing materials because of specific insulating properties so they aren’t caught unawares once ambient conditions change.”
The stakes are high, she says, as NASA and other space agencies plan for increasingly longer space missions. Spacecraft must endure grueling conditions.
Dennison says Whiteley, who was one of USU’s 2020 Goldwater Scholars, is among the most inquisitive scholars he’s ever met.
“Jenny is an ideal candidate to pursue a challenging research endeavor, because she’s naturally curious and never gives up,” he says. “She asks lots of questions, reads and listens to other scholars. She genuinely wants to understand difficult concepts and isn’t afraid of failure.”
That last quality, Dennison says, makes Whiteley an effective teacher as well as a researcher. Whiteley says one of the best parts of teaching is helping others move beyond bewilderment to confident comprehension.
“Teaching has given me the opportunity to internalize concepts at a much deeper level than what I understood when I took the class myself,” she says. “I really enjoy helping others who are overwhelmed by the physics concepts or by the volume of material hurled at them. It’s quite fun to help a student go from ‘I’m so confused” to ‘maybe I’ve got this.’”
