"I study high temperature intermetallic formation reactions. That bright flash of light is a crash course in the materials science of interdiffusion, phase transformations, and kinetics – and it’s all over in less than a second! In fact, the short lifetime of the reaction means I work with collaborators all over JHU and the country to find experiments fast enough to elucidate the reaction steps."

Sara Barron worked as a post-doctoral researcher with Professor Timothy Weihs on temperature measurements during rapid self-propagating formation reactions in multilayered foils. She is still studying phase transformations, now as an ARRA post-doctoral fellow at NIST, where she investigates the optical properties of thermochromic coatings for ‘smart’ building windows.