Katharine Jensen
Department of Physics

Katharine Jensen is a Ph.D. student at Harvard studying Physics, with a concentration in Materials Science. She started her career in experimental science the summer after graduating from high school, working in an organic chemistry laboratory at Amherst College on the design and synthesis of template molecules for creating catalytic polymers. She continued to build a breadth of research experience during her undergraduate years through summer internships and semester-long projects on genetic expression analysis, microfluidics, and quantum computing, culminating in a year-long senior thesis project exploring electrolysis and ion exchange in glass towards building a miniature atomic clock vapor cell. Katharine completed her A.B. in Physics with high honors at Princeton University in 2004. She then spent two years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Electro-optical Materials and Devices group working with 3-5 semiconductor lasers and avalanche photodiodes. Her research at Lincoln Laboratory focused on designing, building, and interpreting experiments to understand the defects that limited device performance. This experience cemented her decision to pursue a career in research science, and helped to develop her interest in materials science. In physics graduate school at Harvard, Katharine is co-advised by Prof. David Weitz and Prof. Frans Spaepen. Her research focuses on understanding the relationship of structure and dynamics in hard-sphere colloidal crystals and glasses as experimental models of atomic materials, with particular emphasis on the specific, local mechanisms of deformation in amorphous materials. This work employs the tools of soft condensed matter physics to attack fundamental problems in materials science, and is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Weitz and Spaepen labs. Along with her research interests, Katharine is strongly committed to teaching and mentoring. She has supervised seven undergraduate students — including four women — for summer or semester-long research projects. She also has served as a Teaching Fellow for four courses at Harvard, including the first iteration of the new "Science and Cooking" general education.