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Ph.D. candidate wins IEEE pulsed power award

April 25, 2025 - By Carly Bowling

photo: Stacie Hernandez

Stacie Hernandez, a Ph.D. candidate at The University of New Mexico, has been named the recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society’s Robert J Barker Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Pulsed Power Applications.

The award honors outstanding graduate students in pulsed power research and applications. Hernandez will accept the award this June at the IEEE Pulsed Power & Plasma Science Conference in Berlin, Germany. It comes with a $3,000 prize and a $500 travel allowance.

“I feel so blessed and honored to receive this award named for such a distinguished member of our field, Dr. Robert J. Barker. He had such a large impact on our field, not only in pulsed power or high power microwave sources, but all of plasma physics. Honestly, this is such a great feeling,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez graduated from UNM with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 2020. Throughout her undergraduate studies, she worked in Distinguished Professor Edl Schamiloglu’s lab studying high-power beams and pulsed power. She interned at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Tau Technologies, Meow Wolf and the Air Force Research Lab. As a Ph.D. student, Hernandez holds a graduate assistantship with Sandia National Laboratories, where her work focuses largely on conducting pulsed power research. At Sandia, Hernandez has been able to conduct diagnostic experiments with the Z Pulsed Power Machine, one of the world’s largest x-ray machines.

Hernandez has been an active member of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. In 2023, she helped organize Noche de Ciencias, where students and their parents learn about STEM opportunities through interactive experiments and presentations. After she finishes her dissertation this fall, she would like to continue working in diagnostics and hopes to help build an engineering pipeline for girls and minority students starting in elementary school.