Gary Lander
"WVU provided the environment and tools necessary for me to be able to walk into a national lab after graduate school and have the skills, knowledge, and confidence to immediately start contributing to the projects that I was assigned."
Dr. Gary Lander is an experimental physicist and optical engineer working with the advanced sensors group at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). He is a 2022 graduate of the graduate Ph.D. program in the WVU Department of Physics and Astronomy, where he conducted research with Dr. Edward Flagg.
On his time as a student in the WVU Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dr. Lander shared the following:
WVU provided the environment and tools necessary for me to be able to walk into a national lab after graduate school and have the skills, knowledge, and confidence to immediately start contributing to the projects that I was assigned. Working with Professor Flagg helped to not only build and refine my understanding of physics, and specifically quantum optics, but helped to develop critical skills to become a successful research scientist, including sophisticated writing skills, organizational practices, coding skills, and a way of thinking that allows me to ask the right questions to design and conduct relevant experiments in the field. Perhaps most crucial to my current workload, being trusted to learn how to use a wide-range of scientific equipment and having hands-on experience building custom optical systems have given me the confidence to know that I can successfully design, build, and conduct experiments at the national lab level, even if not in my immediate realm of expertise.
Research Interests
I am an experimental physicist and optical engineer working with the advanced sensors group at NETL. My background is in quantum optics and am skilled at building custom optical systems and am familiar with a wide range of scientific equipment, giving me the tools to be able to design and construct sophisticated experiments. Most of my work involves growing single-crystal optical fibers via laser-heated pedestal growth to act as sensors for different physical quantities. Single-crystal optical fiber can withstand very harsh environments and is used in applications such as distributed temperature sensors in nuclear reactors. I am also involved with the quantum sensors group at NETL. Certain materials have interesting quantum properties that can be utilized to detect physical quantities with precision that is unprecedented by classical sensors. We are studying nitrogen vacancies in nanodiamonds and their potential to be used as very precise electromagnetic, temperature, and strain sensors. A few potential applications of the apparatus I'm building is to act as a sensitive magnetic field sensor for the detection of rare earth elements, an electric field sensor to detect small anomalies in the electric grid for preventative maintenance and security, as well as gas specimen detection associated with carbon management applications.