Caress Alumni Speaker: Hannah Yi, PhD, Research Staff Member Institute for Defense Analyses

The Department of Chemistry is pleased to present our first Caress Alumni Speaker:  Dr. Hannah Yi, Research Staff Member Institute for Defense Analyses

This talk defines mission-lethal orbital debris particles, which can disable satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), as bounded by marginally lethal and catastrophically lethal levels. It then uses hydrocode analyses and post-impact orbital dynamics to examine and predict the creation of lethal debris from the impact of untracked orbital debris on a LEO satellite constellation across five impacting mass classes—10mg, 100mg, 1g, 10g, and 100g—at speeds from 4 to 15 kilometers per second.

Bio
Dr. Hannah S. Yi joined the research staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in October 2022 after successfully defending her PhD in Experimental Physical Chemistry from the University of Chicago. She supports the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation by providing objective and independent analyses on the acquisition of space systems for the Department of Defense. Her research interests at IDA include the proliferation of nontrackable micrometeoroids and orbital debris in the growing space domain. In her doctoral work with Professor Norbert F. Scherer, she identified insulin transport dynamics with characteristic anomalous diffusion features to speculate on mechanisms leading to diabetes. The collaborative development of snapshot, three-dimensional imaging systems for fluorescent microscopy enabled this investigation. In addition to her research, she received the Wayne C. Booth Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching during her teaching assistantship. Dr. Yi is an alumna (B.S. ‘16) of the George Washington University. At GW, she was a Learning Assistant for numerous chemistry courses and a researcher in the Voutchkova-Kostal Group. The Madeline Reines Jacobs Fellowship supported her summer research.

Research Interests

Dr. Yi's thesis work blends experiments (molecular biology, live-cell imaging & microscopy development) with applied theory (image analysis for quantitative feature detection, anomalous diffusion, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics & statistical tests/modeling) to discover insulin transport defects related to diabetes. I love breaking down complex, interdisciplinary problems and digesting each step of the analysis pipeline tackling harder problems and learning from subject matter experts at the Institute for Defense Analyses.

The Caress Alumni Speaker Series was endowed by Drs. Edward and Virginia Caress and supports the return of prominent alumni to share their science and wisdom with current students.