Jessica Bickel Biography

Dr. Jessica Bickel received dual bachelors from Johns Hopkins and the Peabody Conservatory. She then went to the University of Michigan where she studied the impact of strain on the surface reconstructions of III-V semiconductors both experimentally (using molecular beam epitaxy and scanning tunneling microscopy, STM) and computationally (using density functional theory, DFT). She received her Ph.D in 2010 and moved to Hamburg Germany where she was supported by an Alexander von Humbolt Fellowship to use scanning tunneling microscopy to study small atomic magnets. From Germany she moved back to the U.S. to Mount Holyoke College where she had a research-teaching postdoc and learned pedagogy techniques teaching introductory physics while researching ferromagnetic nanorings. She joined Cleveland State in 2014. In her lab she examines the effect of surfaces on the self-assembly of organic molecules both experimentally (via evaporation and STM) and computationally (using DFT). She also examines how students learn, and even has a paper examining phase transitions in Absinthe.