Freshman MSE Student Selected for Prestigious Summer SULI Internship

While first-year students are seldom selected in the prestigious U.S. Department of Energy Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program, Julia Diaz is looking forward to spending her ten-week summer internship at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).

Diaz, who plans to be a School of Engineering Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) major, first visited the department as a student at Edison Academy Magnet School in a tour arranged by her science teacher and SoE alumnus, Dr. James Colaizzi. 

"I found the fact that MSE can be applied to everything, and does research in everything, very interesting, but I didn't seriously consider it until I took an Admitted Students Day tour," Diaz recalls. "I loved the program I saw there and found the students to be nice and the professors approachable. I never considered studying MSE anywhere else, because the Rutgers program was such a good fit."

MSE Distinguished Professor and Chair Lisa Klein notes, "Julia Diaz is an example of our outreach to high school students. When we have a chance to share our excitement about  inventing new materials, we know we can attract outstanding students interested in making a real difference."

Joining an MSE Research Team

Ashutosh Goel, a professor in the MSE department, remembers how he received

 an email in October 2025 from freshman Diaz "who shared that she was determined to study MSE at Rutgers in part because she wanted to work with my group on nuclear waste glasses. She joined my research team—and less than six months later she had earned a spot in the SULI program."

Diaz is really exited about glass, and nuclear glass in particular. "My field of passion is glass," she enthuses. "I want to be a part of the breakthroughs in nuclear glass, and I love learning about the work being done in this field. I'm also excited by the diverse fields of glass Dr. Goel's research group works in—from nuclear glass to lunar glass—and the many opportunities it creates for research interests."

As a team member, she is currently working on a structure property project that involves melting and testing nearly 100 different types of glass, and creating a dataset that will be made into a machine learning model. 

An Invaluable Opportunity

Diaz chose to conduct her SULI internship at INL because of its focus on innovative nuclear research and nuclear materials. She will be working under Dr. Donna Guillen, INL group lead and distinguished research engineer, whose expertise ranges from nuclear reactor fuels and materials experiments to waste-form development. During her internship, she expects to work on the computational side of nuclear glass, modeling refractory corrosion. 

"I'm most looking forward to learning about the computational side of glass research, as my experience thus far has been hands-on," she says. "It's impossible in today's world to do research without a computational element, so I'm very excited to expand my skill set by learning more about computational work."

Goel remarks, "At MSE at Rutgers, we do fascinating research. We build careers. And we build the talent pipeline for the nation and the world."

And Diaz fully intends to be part of the SoE talent pipeline by eventually pursuing an academic or industry career in glass.