2025 Mayer Scholarship Recipient

Posted in News Story

The Department of Physics is pleased to announce that Erin Marlowe is the recipient of the 2025 Professor Walter G. Mayer Endowed Scholarship, which supports a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in experimental physics.

Erin’s research focuses on metallic nanowires and foams for multifunctional filtration media explorations and for interactions with neuronal cell growth and manipulation. Conventional filtration media such as N95 face masks utilize electrostatically charged polymer fibers as the basic building blocks, which are difficult to clean and reuse. Erin has been exploring nanoporous metallic nanowire foams as a smart filtration platform. Her research has focused on advancing the understanding of foam filtration as well as air cleaning mechanisms, and transforming these promising materials into sustainable filtration media. She has also successful demonstrated high entropy alloy nanowires and thin films made by electrochemical deposition. Furthermore, Erin has been studying the interaction of nanowires with neuron cells, to understand the impact of magnetic fields on neuronal networks with single cell resolution.