In October of last year, senior physics major Julia Vernon was experimenting with the auditory risks of chemistry explosions. Upon encouragement from her professor, Dr. Kent Gee, and with his help and that of Dr. Jeffrey Macedone, of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Vernon wrote an abstract on their findings for the Acoustical Society of America (ASA).
But this was just the beginning. Early winter semester, Vernon was selected to present her abstract at the joint meeting of ASA’s 159th Semi-Annual Meeting and Noise-Con 2010. This year’s conference was held April 19-23 in Baltimore, with over 700 presentations spanning the five days.
Up until the conference, Vernon was tweaking her presentation. She had a practice run at the annual Spring Research Conference a month before. After running thorough the abstract and PowerPoint countless times, it was her turn to present.
“It was scary,” Vernon said. “Even as I got up there I wasn’t sure I could do it. But Dr. Gee encouraged me, and it was such a great opportunity to present at a national conference as an undergrad. It was really cool.”
Vernon’s presentation was on the potential auditory risk of exploding chemistry demonstrations in the classroom. Her findings outlined the safety precautions that should be taken during these presentations, and which explosions are not worth the risk.
In the end, all the practices and effort paid off. A month after the conference, Vernon received a letter in the mail informing her that she had won the “Young Presenter Award in Noise.” She was very excited about the honor, and about the conference experience as a whole.
“I had the opportunity to learn about a lot of other types of acoustics that we don’t focus on here at BYU,” Vernon said. “I’ll probably stick with physical acoustics, but it was really interesting to see how broad acoustics really is. I enjoyed looking at all the different areas of acoustics and meeting people who shared the same interests.”