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2014 ANNUAL REPORT 9 RESEARCHER PROFILES After graduating from high school in her native India in 2006 Mahima Gupta moved to the U.S. to attend the University of Michigan with every intention of studying genetic engineering. But even the best plans often dont go as expected. I was always interested in physics says Guptaso I was taking an honors class. My teacher was this crazy German guy very intelligent and his class just blew my mind. She spent the following summer working with that professor on one of the first programs in the U.S. investi- gating Bose-Einstein condensates.When she resumed her undergraduate studies in the fall her advisor suggested she look into nuclear engineering. It was instant love Gupta says.I loved that you could use nuclear power to create carbon-free electricity. It was clean renewablethe whole deal. During her undergraduate time at Michigan she served as president of the localAmerican Nuclear Society chapter. At one of the societys conferences she met Dr.ToddAllen. She mentioned she wasnt sure where she wanted to go to graduate school and he asked what she wanted to study.When she said fuels he suggested she come to the University of Wisconsin Madison UW and work with him. She agreed and received her Ph.D. inApril 2015 after spending the last two years finishing her thesis at INL. I was finished with all my classes in the summer of 2013 says Gupta so I moved to Idaho. I worked at the Materials and Fuels Complex MFC for a year and then started an internship with ATR NSUF. Its been a great experience. She wasted no time taking advantage of the NSUFs proposal process.With two proposals already accepted the first of which is included in this annual report and a third submitted she is already making her mark as an up-and-coming researcher.The initial proposal a first-of-its-kind experi- ment examined the effects of irradia- tion on uranium-dioxide UO2 at the atomic level. Most studies on irradiation damage in UO2 are usually done on a larger scale explains Gupta. Were looking at angstrom and sub-angstrom scales so the physics is totally different. One of my goals is to see if there is any relationship between these really tiny scales and slightly larger scales. She spent the first two years of the project irradiating her samples in the Ion Beam Laboratory at UW one of the NSUFs partner institutions. It was one of the first ion accelerator irradiations completed on UO2 at the UW lab. She also helped write the protocols for those irradiations and as a result UW now has a prepara- tion facility that can handle irradiated Mahima Gupta