Helen Kuo '20

Helen Kuo is, to say the least, a well-rounded successful student. She is not only an outstanding MSE Senior but also a dedicated member of the Concrete Canoe project team, a fantastic TA and enjoys teaching climbing and backpacking with Cornell Outdoor Education. Helen was also the recipient of the 2019 Oustanding Undergraduate Advanced Materials Research Achievement Award for her work in Professor Baker's lab, which included working with complex data sets and performing new experiments to address the questions raised by the data. She will be continuing her work in the Baker Lab for her Senior Honor's Thesis. Helen spent the summer of 2017 as an Undergraduate Student Researcher at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, focused on CO₂ Reduction with ruthenium nanoparticles. In the summer of 2018, Helen was Mickey Leland Energy Fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she focused on capacitive deionization of water and was invited back summer 2019 to continue her work. 

Helen was drawn to Cornell University because of the access to amazing hiking and an incredible community of outdoorsy people.  Also, Cornell is one of the few schools to offer Materials Science & Engineering as an undergraduate major.  Helen describes the draw of MSE, "I enjoy understanding the connections between atomic level microstructure and the large level properties that affect how materials can be used in real-life applications; from the first MSE class I took, this aspect of the major attracted me. In addition, materials science has a huge array of applications so with a degree in MSE, I can enter virtually any field that interests me."  And while she doesn't have definite plans for after graduation, she is looking forward to leveraging her degree to apply for both industry jobs and graduate PhD programs.  For up and coming students, Helen offers this piece of advice, "Sleep is highly underrated - sleeping instead of studying/doing psets til 3 am is almost always the move."