I am Hannah Rose Margavio, an undergraduate honors student studying chemical

engineering. I began chemical engineering work at Buff City soap in Memphis, Tennessee,
where I made organic soap, bath-bombs and lotion bars for a family-owned business in my
hometown. In addition to crafting the organic products, the company utilized my extensive
knowledge in chemistry to make revisions to their family recipes in order to ensure the safest,
highest-quality soap and other cosmetic items. An example of the engineering I did at Buff City
Soap was changing the concentration of sodium hydroxide in our lye solution, as some
customers had complained about the soap being too harsh and drying out the skin. Upon
researching the minimum concentration of sodium hydroxide for the saponification process
with the plant-based oils we were using, I realized that we could decrease the sodium
hydroxide concentration significantly, resulting in a decrease of cost of raw materials and a
softer, more moisturizing bar of soap.
Once I started college at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, I quickly
discovered my passion for research upon being selected for a research fellowship position
through the honors college. My assignment was to assist mathematics Professor Ebiefung in
writing an entry level statistics book. One of the projects I lead was comparing the nutritional
and monetary data of various popular fast food chains and performing linear regressions on
each set of data. In addition to finding real-life data, I assisted the professor in writing the
example problems in a comprehensive, yet concise manner. I enjoyed working with Dr.
Ebiefung because he truly showed me the in’s and out’s of research and how it is conducted.
After completing my research fellowship with Dr. Ebiefung, I was eager to join another
project. Luckily, the first AIChe meeting towards the end of August 2017 introduced Dr.
Sungwoo Yang from MIT as a new professor in chemical engineering, who had conducted
research on silica aerogel before, and was looking for undergraduates to help him continue,
and I joined his lab group. Here, my work involves exploring the radiative properties of silica
aerogel in order to understand mathematically what occurs when an incident light beam
penetrates the aerogel. The primary goal of the Yang Lab group is to build a device that
harvests clean water from the humidity in the air using the aerogel, so understanding
fundamental physical properties of the substance will help us engineer a better water
harvester. To quantify these radiative properties, we solve the inverse of the radiative transfer
equation (RTE) using Gauss-Legendre Quadrature with a solution originally written in Fortran,
which I translated into Python 3.7. This solution yields the source function and the intensity of
the incident light beam, which we can then use to quantify hemispherical transmittance and
hemispherical reflectance. Hemispherical transmittance and reflectance are crucial properties
of the silica aerogel, since, as the name implies, the substance is highly porous. These pores
affect the nature of the incident light beam that penetrates the sample by reflecting, scattering,
and transmitting the light in all different directions. Thus, quantifying these properties builds a
fundamental understanding of how light passes through silica aerogel.
Upon completing my undergraduate education, I plan to go to graduate school to obtain
my Master’s degree in either computer engineering or chemical engineering, following with a
PhD in whichever I end up choosing. My passion is research and lifelong learning, so with that in
mind, I would want to go into the research and development of eco-friendly fuel sources. After
researching for some time, I would want to come back to academia and teach as a professor at
a university where I can conduct my own undergraduate research.