ABINGTON, Pa. — A Penn State Abington engineering major is flourishing academically and laying the groundwork for the future by capitalizing on opportunities open to undergraduates including research with faculty, employment on campus that applies to his field, and presenting his research at a professional conference.
Javari Cherry, a sophomore from Philadelphia, enrolled at Abington in 2021 and immediately began earning credits by analyzing data for a research project led by Burcu Ozden, assistant professor of engineering, through ACURA (Abington College Undergraduate Research Activities).
Ozden quickly became a mentor to Cherry and a conduit for building connections in his budding career.
“Dr. Ozden is not only an expert in the field and a highly interesting person, but she is also a minority like me and a woman and not from this country. She has been mentoring me, and she has been through a lot of what I need to do,” he said.
Last summer, Ozden’s networks led her to recommend Cherry for a job as a research assistant at University Park’s Ken and Mary Alice Lindquist Department of Nuclear Engineering, in a lab led by Jean Paul Allain, the Huck chair professor and head of nuclear engineering.
“I was there for two months and worked with a post-doctoral student as well as people in the materials science lab. There were a lot of wonderful people who took the time to teach me, and I developed a deeper understanding of analyzing data and drawing conclusions from the data,” Cherry, who is majoring in aerospace engineering with a minor in applied math, said.
This fall, Ozden again played an important role in Cherry’s progression by supporting him when he applied to present his summer research at a regional conference of the American Physics Society. His poster, "The Effects of Gamma-Ray Irradiation on Physicochemical Properties of MoSe2," was selected, and he was the only undergraduate from a Penn State Commonwealth Campus to participate.
“It was a great experience, and I had the time to talk to people from other universities about their projects. They were mostly seniors, and it was very intimidating, but I learned a lot about navigating the research field,” he said.
As the result of his research experiences during his first and second years as an engineering major, Cherry is developing two articles to submit to scientific journals.
“It’s a heavy lift writing for a scholarly article, and Dr. Ozden is helping me with editing. She is good at this, and she explains the process clearly. She is a really wonderful person and professor,” he said.