Soft AE Trainees are offered support to enable Immersive Experiences in environments outside of Penn that will facilitate their research or professional advancement. These personalized opportunities are meant to offer professional experience consistent with Soft AE convergence/interdisciplinary Soft AE-related research or science policy training beyond what is typically expected for conventional STEM PhD degree programs. For example, disciplinary meetings, conferences and short courses needed for disciplinary research would not fall in the category of a Soft AE IE.
IEs are developed by individual trainees and the Soft AE Program leads, with approval from the trainee’s faculty supervisor(s), and input from any mentors involved in the trainee’s professional development or hosting the IE.
Completed IEs
Jonathan Mui
Jonathan Mui completed his Immersive Experience at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he conducted autonomous experimentation research on high-throughput synthesis and characterization for materials optimization. Jonathan writes about the experience in his reflection piece, “Collaborative Visit with Sandia National Laboratory.”
George Hollyer
George Hollyer completed his Immersive Experience in the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, NY. He worked on x-ray absorption spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy, ultra-high pressure in situ TEM, and correlative XAS-TEM in situ experiments of catalyst materials. George describes his experience in “Part of the Team.”
Leonardo Ferreira Guilhoto
Leo Ferreira-Guilhoto completed his immersive experience with Meta’s Adaptive Experimentation (AE) research team in New York City.
Justin Hughes
Justin Hughes completed his immersive experience at the Grenoble Energy Conversion & Storage (ENGINE2025) Winter School at the Grenoble Institute of Technology in Grenoble, France. Justin describes his experience in “Bridging Polymer Science, Electrochemistry, and Machine Learning at ENGINE2025.”
Gabriel Vega Bellido
Aria Zhang
Gabriel Vega Bellido and Aria Zhang participated in the first SOtL-Energy Workshop (Washington, DC, May 20-24, 2024) offered by the Soft AE Program, in partnership with KCEP and CSPO at ASU. Gabriel and Aria wrote about their IE in their Reflection Piece, Navigating the Complexities of U.S. Science Policy.
Maggie Brown
Maggie Brown attended the World Energy Council’s 26th Congress Redesigning Energy for the People and Planet (Rotterdam, Netherlands, April 22-25, 2024). She also continued her participation on a project led by a student she met in one of the Soft AE courses, J. Ohene-Akoto, who is one of the board members for the World Energy Council’s Future Energy Leaders Program. Maggie shares her experiences in her piece, “Balancing the Interdependent Energy Transition and AI Revolution from an International Energy Policy Lens.“