Kolenkow-Reitz Fellowship recipients Owen Zhang ’26 and Fin Fuhrmann ’26 share summer experiences

The Kolenkow-Reitz Fellowship empowers Carleton students to engage in summer or winter break research with non-Carleton science and math faculty. The initiative is aimed at nurturing scientific talent and encouraging exploration of STEM fields as potential career paths.

Owen Zhang ’26, a physics major with minors in math and German, had the opportunity to work on physical chemistry research with the chemistry department at the University of California–Berkeley. There, he worked in the labs of chemistry professors Stephen Leone and Daniel Neumark.

Over the summer, Zhang assisted Berkeley researchers on measuring the absorption energy spectra of methyl molecules after photodissociation. This measurement is used to calculate the mode and speed of molecular vibration. Zhang said that while “it doesn’t have a lot of real-life applications,” the experimental research he and the Berkeley team conducted is “verifying if [the current physical] theory is correct.”

For Zhang, the experience was new in two different respects: physical chemistry and experimental research. Despite not having as strong of a background in chemistry as in physics, Zhang said that the experience “opened a whole other feeling to me. I really enjoyed it.”

As the most junior person in his laboratory group, the mentorship of the postgraduate students and professors were an especially big part of Zhang’s positive experience.

“It turns out that even though the professor is a renowned researcher, a very famous and successful professor, he’s very down-to-Earth,” Zhang said. “He’s very friendly. He was proactively trying to check in with me, see how I’m doing.”

Zhang noted that although Berkeley is much larger than Carleton, the community still felt tightly connected. Zhang was even invited to play in the summer softball tournament between the chemistry research groups.

“I’m planning on doing my comps on something related to this project now,” Zhang said. “Before this summer, I’d never had experience in an experimental lab, and I’ve always enjoyed working with pen and paper.”

Looking toward his future in physics, Zhang had always considered himself more of a theorist. “But then I learned that an experimental lab has its own fun,” he said.

Zhang found that the experimental research worked hand-in-hand with the theoretical research being conducted. His lab’s research was working with an extended theory about molecular dynamics, and “whatever theory you come up with, it has to agree with the data eventually, but that only applies when your data is actually accurate.”

A meticulous process, the data collection in the lab often required hours of setting up, waiting, and monitoring the instruments that conduct a technique called transient absorption spectroscopy. Zhang described playing card games during long hours in the lab with his research group, and the fun of it.

Overall, Zhang’s experience as a Kolenkow-Reitz Fellowship recipient was a very positive one. 

“I think it’s very important to see what people are actually doing out there in the world,” he said, “and there are many different ways of doing good science.”

Fin Fuhrmann ’26, a geology major, was able to work under the direction of Professor Erin Pettit of Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.

Fuhrmann originally came into contact with Pettit through a Carleton parent-student meetup in his hometown of Seattle, Washington. The project that he assisted with was “perfect,” he said, because it involved the North Cascades in Washington state.

Having been to two of the valleys he studied, “I really enjoyed being able to study something that I was already familiar with,” Fuhrmann said.

The broader project that Pettit is working on involves testing her working hypothesis against a series of case studies on different mountain ranges parallel to the coastline. When Fuhrmann came to work for her, she had already done three studies in New Zealand, Antarctica, and South America.

“This whole project is focusing on glacial erosion patterns,” Fuhrmann said. “When you have an ice cap on these mountains, and you have precipitation build-up on the windward side, you get this difference in ice dynamics where the windward side is moving faster and quicker, and the leeward side is moving slower and at shallower angles. That lends itself to the leeward side having warmer basal ice temperatures, which is more conducive to erosion.”

Fuhrmann spent a few weeks at the beginning and end of the summer in the office at Oregon State, and the time in between working asynchronously. He described much of the work involving “data management and using softwares including MATLAB, Python, and QGIS to map and model some of these different data sets.”

While collecting in-the-field data wasn’t a possibility for this experience, Fuhrmann was still able to work with the modeled data and test Pettit’s hypothesis based on different variables such as “Western and Eastern Cascades, ice flows, surface velocity, basal temperature, thickness, and extent.”

Fuhrmann found that because of the model’s resolution, it was unable to sufficiently test the hypothesis on the entirety of the North Cascades. At the end of the summer, Fuhrmann “wrangled” all of his information and gave a presentation to Pettit and the glaciology team at Oregon State.

However, Fuhrmann’s work with Pettit isn’t over yet — many senior geology students at Carleton take their research from a previous summer into their comps project, and he is no different. Fuhrmann plans “to crop down the model to a specific area [of the Cascades] and rerun it at a high resolution, then go from there to analyze that data set and hopefully have a better study.”

During his experience, Fuhrmann appreciated the amount of autonomy Pettit gave him to test her hypothesis “in whatever ways I found interesting.” He said, “I think that really helped me feel confident and really fully learn what I was studying.”

Furthermore, with the help of the Kolenkow-Reitz Fellowship, Fuhrmann noted that it’s much easier to connect with the research because the interest is coming from a place of real excitement, and “you’re not relying on [the University] to pay you.” This, combined with Pettit’s supportive teaching, helped Fuhrmann to think about the kind of approach he wants to take to geology in his career.