My name is Lane Gunderman. In my free time, I play card games, read plays, bake, and talk with people. I am currently a third year undergraduate at MIT studying chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Since coming to MIT, I have taken classes in quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, game theory, abstract algebra, quantum computation. In general, my interests lie in physics and the group of computational, physical, and theoretical chemistry, as well as quantum computation applications to these fields. During the past four summers, I have done research that has included spectroscopy firmware development, molecular simulations of a photosynthetic protein complex, and simulation statistics for polymer chains.
As my research interests are in atypical niches, I am interested in mentoring projects in things other than those topics briefly described above. I would be most interested in mentoring projects which are either research based or are focused on learning a topic that is rarely explored by precollege students, although I am also open to other project ideas. The goal would be to gain a fair understanding of something for which a full course might not be taken for another three years. An example of a research project would be writing a small function library for analyzing molecules, while an example of a learning project would be something more along the lines of reading through a quantum mechanics textbook or a set of plays and analyzing them or learning some quantum computation. Those are just quick examples, but not meant to be a total representation of projects. No matter the project, my involvement would be to provide resources and if appropriate provide homework problems to guide learning.
A variety of resources to consult:
- MIT’s Open Courseware Sites for courses such as: 8.04/8.05/8.06 or 5.61/5.62
- For physical chemistry resources, check out McQuarrie’s books on quantum chemistry or statistical mechanics.
- For computational science, check out a book on Java or C++ and familiarize yourself with one of those languages or read about topics such as Monte Carlo Simulations and those links that follow from it.
- For play related projects, form a list of plays you’d like to read. Some canonical playwrights are Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and August Wilson.
- For quantum computation, try Google-ing the topic and doing a random walk through wikipedia through things like Shor's algorithm and the quantum phase estimation algorithm.
Feel free to email me if you need advice on a starting point, otherwise, best of luck! (If I mentored you last year, feel free to email me with questions if you would like to work together again this year).
Last modified on April 13, 2016 at 08:50 p.m.