I started my PhD at MIT in September of 2019. USNC was in a state of belated fundraising, and I spent most of my time working on that while just barely getting by in classes. I managed to avoid get suckered into a research project until November, when the apparent slacking started to look egregious, and USNC had finally hit it off with an excellent investor.
The project was on colloids for single-phase heat transfer with Dr. Bren Phillips and Prof Jacopo Buongiorno, as well Abdullah Osman, my friend in his last year as an undergraduate. Later, Minuk Jung, a new graduate student in mechanical engineering, would continue the project. The idea was to define and predict heat transfer performance for colloids in single-phase cooling applications. And then design, make, and test a colloid to maximize that performance. In the end, I learned some plumbing and made observations that did not match predictions. Here's a brief summary of the 100 page report.