WVU alum wins prestigious international dissertation award

Scott Cushing performs research with his professor, Dr. Nick Wu. 

Scott Cushing, who earned his Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from WVU in 2015, has won the 2016 Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award for his dissertation Plasmonic Enhancement Mechanisms in Solar Energy Harvesting.

Cushing’s thesis examines why plasmonics, the study of interactions between electromagnetic field and free electrons in metal, rarely appear in solar architecture. Cushing was mentored at WVU by Nick Wu and Alan Bristow. As a student at WVU, Cushing was a 2010 Goldwater Scholar and a recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Leone Group at the University of California, Berkeley.

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