Student spotlight: Savi Thompson

As Savi Thompson bonded with classmates during her first year at Carnegie Mellon, she realized how other friendships in her life have shaped her. Thompson has known her best friend for almost a decade, and they remained close even after Thompson moved from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh during high school. "It's refreshing to have someone who has seen you go through different stages of who you are," she says.

At CMU, Thompson has noticed the ways people come together to make each other feel good, like complimenting those who inspire them. She quickly found a way to add something.

After taking a Star Wars course through the Student College (StuCo) in the fall of her first year, Thompson founded a Star Wars club with a few friends. They want it to be a place where students can come to unwind from academics. "That extends to all people, whether you've watched every piece of Star Wars media or never heard of it before," says Thompson.

The lightsaber training that Thompson runs on the weekends is open to anyone who walks by. "If you want to learn, we can teach you," she says. At each practice, they warm-up with basic lightsaber spins and learn new styles and tricks. Then, Thompson and other club leaders teach a choreographed duel. They're working on the duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin from Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. Thompson has the whole duel memorized.

Back in our galaxy, undergraduate research also brought Thompson to the cosmic frontier. She worked with Matteo Cremonesi, assistant professor of physics. Because of Thompson's unique skills and perspective as a chemical engineering major interested in quantum physics, Cremonesi connected her with the Cosmic Quantum team at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). They are using superconducting qubits to detect particle interactions.

Thompson helped the team refine its measurement taking. During her summer internship, she recalibrated the parameters of a newly-installed board. "There is a lot more fine tuning than you might think. I had to look at a range of amplification and a range of frequencies, for example, before I found the essential values necessary in order to take more interesting measurements," she says.

Because the Cosmic Quantum team uses a remote system, Thompson continued her research from campus in the fall. She wrote code to send information to the computer linked to the team's qubit setup. That computer then sends information to the board on the device, which plays the stimuli and takes the measurements.

The device that Thompson worked with is housed in a dilution refrigerator underground. It isn't always cold enough to take the measurements that her group needed, so Thompson learned about the refrigeration system and the qubits.

We tend to look at things at the macroscopic level, or we’ll break it down to atoms and molecules, but what about beyond that?

Savi Thompson, Undergraduate student, Chemical Engineering

Thompson is fascinated by finding ways to describe things that we cannot see. "I am interested in figuring out the fundamentals of how the universe actually works," she says. "We tend to look at things at the macroscopic level, or we'll break it down to atoms and molecules, but what about beyond that?"

Even while focusing on larger scale processes in her chemical engineering classes, Thompson is learning problem solving skills that apply to her research interests. "You need to be able to look at a system, break it down into manageable pieces, describe what is going on, and know when it's fair to make assumptions," she says.

Thompson chose to major in chemical engineering because the degree gives her access to many industries, as well as to careers in research. "Do I want my work to be applied or basic? Do I want to work in manufacturing or research and development? As I navigate those decisions, the chemical engineering degree gives me what I need for any of those paths," she says.