People

Current Members

Serena Eley
Principal Investigator
Assistant Professor of Physics
Curriculum Vitae

Email: serenaeley@mines.edu
Office: CoorsTek Center for Applied Sciences, Room 315
Lab: CoorsTek Center for Applied Sciences, Room 018

Education

B.S., Physics, California Institute of Technology
Ph.D., Physics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Los Alamos National Laboratory (Postdoctoral Scholar)

Biography

Serena Eley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and the Materials Science Program at the Colorado School of Mines. She grew up in northern Virginia, where attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a state-chartered magnet school focused on pre-college science and engineering education. She earned her B.S. in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. Afterwards, as a Henry Luce Scholar, she gained experience performing high-pressure synthesis of superconductors at the International Superconductivity Technology Center in Tokyo, Japan. Upon completing this fellowship, Eley worked as a test engineering for Raytheon Infrared Operations in Santa Barbara, California before entering graduate school at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where she earned her Ph.D. in condensed matter physics. Her dissertation work, for which she received the John Bardeen Award, focused on proximity effects and vortex dynamics in nanostructured superconductors, revealing behavior that deviated strongly from conventional proximity effect theories.
Prior to joining the faculty at Mines, Serena was a postdoctoral researcher in the Condensed Matter and Magnet Science department at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and as a staff scientist in the Department of Quantum Phenomena at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). At LANL, her research on thermally activated vortex motion (creep) in superconductors with different defect landscapes contributed to the discovery of a universal relationship for a lower bound on creep rates. At SNL, she gained experience setting up test set-ups for, measuring, and designing Si-based devices composed of quantum dot nanostructures and shallow donors for spin quantum bits. Professor Eley’s current research interests include low temperature physics, applied superconductivity, disorder in quantum materials, and mitigating materials related issues that limit superconducting circuit operation. Outside of physics, Serena is an accomplished long distance runner, having placed 3rd in the Bighorn 100 miler (2015), 2nd in the Angeles Crest 100 miler (2017), 6th in the Budapest Marathon (2016), 1st in the Angel Fire 50-miler (2017), 1st in the Old Goats 50-miler (2014), and 1st in three Dances-with-Dirt 50K races (2010-2011).

Brooks Venuti

Graduate Student
Skyrmion Dynamics
BS, Physics 2018 (Mines)
Lakewood, CA

Elyse McEntee

Graduate Student (new, 2/2021)
Fellowship at NIST Boulder
BS, Physics (Willamette University)
Castle Rock, CO

Sean Suh

Graduate Student (new, 8/2021)
BS, Mat. Sci. (Sungkyunkwan U.)
MS, Mat. Sci. (Univ. of Washing.)
Seoul, South Korea

Farai Mazhandu

Graduate Student (new, 9/2021)
BS, Physics (Natl Univ. of Sci. & Tech.)
MS, Physics (Univ. Witwatersrand)
Zimbabwe

Paul Slayback

Mines UG Research Fellow
Mechanical Exfoliation of 2D Heterostructures
Loveland, CO

Nathan Taylor

Mines UG Research Fellow
Superconducting Resonators (interested in QISE)
Portland, OR

Connor Hewson

Mines UG Research Fellow
Vortices in Superconductors
Lexington, SC

Aliyah Matthews

Mines UG Research Fellow
Vortices in Superconductors (interested in Nuclear Physics)
Aurora, CO

Brandon Di Genova

Undergraduate
Electrochemical Growth of Superconductors

Mateo Serrano

Undergraduate
Superconducting Resonators
Colorado

Roswell Demott

Undergraduate
HTSC, Vortices in Superconductors
Colorado Springs, CO

Duncan Fuehne

Undergraduate
SF Heterostructures (interested in QISE & Subatomic physics)
Los Alamos, NM

Jonatan Soto Ramos De Oliveira

Undergraduate
Vortices in Superconductors (interested in QISE)
São Paulo, Brazil

Past Members

Sarah Jones

Mines UG Research Fellow
Vortex Dynamics
BS, Physics 2020 (Mines)
Now Grad. Student at CU Boulder
Evergreen, CO

Matthew Barbattini

Mines UG Research Fellow
Electrochemical Growth of Superconductors

Haley Cole

Undergraduate
Vortex Dynamics in Superconductors
Now Grad. Student at UT Austin
Fairfax, VA

Austin Holmes

Undergraduate
Electrical Probe Station

Majid Mohammad

Undergraduate
Building a 4K Measurement Station for EEGN532
Now Grad. Student at UCSB

Josh Moler

Mines UG Research Fellow
Electrochemical Growth of Superconductors

Alexander Roush

Undergraduate
Building an Electrical Probe Station
Arvada, CO

Lucas Eddy

Graduate Student
Growth of vdW magnets
BS, Physics 2020 (UT Dallas)
Irving, TX

Avery Plantz

Undergraduate, BS Physics 2020
Building an Electrical Probe Station

Bennett Steward

Undergraduate, BS Physics 2020
Building an Electrical Probe Station
Boerne, Texas

Tara Braden

Undergraduate, BS Physics 2020
Electrochemical Growth of Superconductors

Connor Pierce

Graduate, MS Physics 2019
Vortex Dynamics in Superconductors
Parker, CO

Daniel Alvarez

Mines UG Research Fellow
SiNx Nanostencils

Annabelle Peterson

Undergraduate, Physics
Lab Assistant

Sun (Ying) Yu

Undergraduate, Physics BS 2019
SiNx Nanostencils

Caleb Hammel

Undergraduate, Physics BS 2019
SiNx Nanostencils
Berthoud, CO

Jonathan Kim

Undergraduate, Physics BS 2019
Building a 4K Dipper Probe
Aurora, CO