Saba Shaik

Saba Shaik is a PhD candidate whose research interests concern the detailed electrochemistry that occurs in electrospray thrusters. A MathWorks Fellowship will support her work to introduce novel experimental methods to characterize these processes and collect and analyze vast amounts of data in MATLAB to develop numerical models of relevant physical phenomena. Her current efforts are centered on determining the composition (molecular and atomic) of species generated via electrochemical processes. The data are obtained as time-cascade quadrupole mass spectra diagrams in which different peaks represent different species. A principal objective of Saba’s work is to design efficient physics-based pattern recognition algorithms to manage various confounding factors (for example, some species are generated through ion beam interactions with vacuum chamber walls, not electrochemistry) and extract useful information from large amounts of overlapping data. Saba’s work has tremendous promise to produce valuable tools and approaches that could advance the field and support the efforts of other researchers.