Student Profiles
Andrew Hartnett
Physics
Class of 2008
A first-year graduate student at Princeton, Hartnett is pursuing a Ph.D. in physics. He laid the foundation for his current specialty, biophysics, through research he performed as an undergraduate in the honors program.
Many of my graduate school classmates went to high-powered schools, but few had the opportunities afforded to me by Notre Dame’s honors program and none look back on their undergraduate experience with the same excitement as I do as a Notre Dame alumnus. I think that it is truly special to find a program that provides unparalleled opportunities for intellectual growth within a community that values our development as well-rounded adults.
For many of us, Professor Neil Delaney was like a second advisor. That was an incredible resource. There was a deep trust in us as students—the program is built on the understanding that we are excited and motivated to do real research.As a result, the honors program was there to open doors and help us when we needed it but also stayed out of the way and gave us the flexibility to carve our own trail. I’m very appreciative of that.
That sort of flexibility has helped me realize my potential as a scientist. For example, the honors program paid for summer cancer treatment research at MIT that I did as an undergraduate. A professor there was willing to work with me, but he couldn’t pay me.
I was studying in Rome at the time and sent Professor Delaney an email explaining the situation, and the next thing I knew there was a check in the mail to pay for my summer housing. The opportunity to go work with world experts on a cutting-edge project that I was truly excited about completely changed my academic path.Beyond getting me into grad school and being the subject of my senior thesis, my summer research experience showed me that I could build a career using physics to impact medical care.
Conventional radiation therapy uses X-rays. You’re radiating a tremendous amount of healthy tissue, and you have some classes of patients—including young children and the elderly—who are more vulnerable to that type of treatment.
One of the emerging treatment technologies is called proton radiotherapy. You shoot protons, instead of electrons, at tumors. A team of physicists has designed a compact, superconducting accelerator that costs approximately $15 million—about a tenth of the price of previous systems. The whole idea is to make this type of treatment more widely available. My undergraduate research dealt specifically with the design of a channel to get protons out of the accelerator and to the patient.
Beyond this experience, the honors program provided me with a broad knowledge base that's been invaluable. In science, you have to get people excited in order to get funding. The ability to communicate extremely technical ideas to a general audience and to understand how you can connect your discipline with a wide variety of others—history, biology, and art, to name a few—is fantastic.
