Michael Gaultois
Michael Gaultois is a graduate student in Chemistry at the U of S, and one of this year's recipients of the Julie Payette-NSERC Research Scholarships, valued at $25,000.
Gaultois studies Spectroscopy, which explores the interactions of matter with energy, and investigating materials and their properties. “My thesis involves advanced spectroscopic techniques using synchrotron radiation,” explains Gaultois, “to investigate next-nearest-neighbour effects, which are one of many competing effects that can cause these spectral energies to change or shift.” Gaultois works with the Canadian Light Source at the U of S, Canada's only synchrotron.
The systems he investigates hope to aid in the development of ceramics which can catalyze industrially important reactions or separate oxygen from gas mixtures. “One promising system,” Gaultois explains, “may be important for the development of materials for sequestering (holding) radionuclides (unstable nuclei that decay by releasing radiation) in nuclear waste, which is a long term goal of the Grosvenor research group.”
Gaultois' research takes place in an emerging field, and he was lucky enough to work in a solid-state chemistry lab during his undergraduate degree which gave him the necessary experience for his current research. He explains that he “loved the unorthodox and unique nature of the work and the type of people it attracted,” and decided he wanted to go deeper. “Despite the brew of courses that are prescribed in undergrad, almost everything you need for solid-state chemistry is new,” says Gaultois, but describes how his thesis supervisor, Dr. Andrew Grosvenor, has great experience in the area.
Gaultois says that the most exciting part of his research is “working with particle accelerators and glass blowing. Working on the synchrotron (the Canadian Light Source) is a blast, as long as you can stay awake for the long shifts. It’s a particle accelerator, just like you see in movies and read about in the news, and it’s every mad scientist’s wildest dream. It’s always mind-blowing to think tens of thousands of years of human development and technology has gone into whizzing things around near the speed of light, with energy being coherently channeled into a spot on your sample, all so that we can generate a simple plot with an X and a Y axis and a few coordinates that form a curve.”
Along with his research, Gaultois has received some technical training in glassblowing, making his own quartz glassware for some of the reactions he does. “It's a lot of fun once you're good at it,” he jokes, “and I use the word “good” lightly, as when I hang out with real glassblowers and see the work they do I can truly appreciate the skill they have.”.
Gaultois is currently looking into doing a PhD, but explains that he is open to other research opportunities. “I believe strongly that I should contribute to the research community, which has greatly benefited human society and culture, and I believe research will be a large part of my career.”
Login