Former Wake Forest undergraduate and Ph.D. students Dr. Katelyn Goetz and Dr. Alex Taylor will visit Wake Forest and engage in a discussion on their careers. Free pizza will be provided.

Alex Taylor joined the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) as a member of the Science and Technology Division research staff in 2022. His research focuses on advanced materials and emerging technologies for aerospace applications, especially for light emission, harvesting and detection. As a member of the space interests working group at IDA, he also participates in research and analysis across a wide range of issues in space policy and strategy. He holds a Doctorate and a Bachelor of Arts in physics from Wake Forest University, completing his thesis research on plasmonic sensing applications with Prof. Dave Carroll. Following this, he spent time as a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Heidelberg and Technical University Dresden in Germany, working on perovskites and quantum dots as high-efficiency materials for light-harvesting applications. Before joining IDA, he was a research fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he worked on novel sensor designs as part of the Planetary Environments Laboratory.

Katelyn Goetz is a research physicist with the Nanoscale Device Characterization Division of the Physical Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She earned her Doctorate and Bachelor of Science degrees in physics from Wake Forest University, completing her thesis research on organic charge-transfer complexes with Prof. Oana Jurchescu. In 2016, she joined the Applied Physical Chemistry lab at the University of Heidelberg as a post-doctoral researcher, focusing on the growth and electrical characterization of single crystals of novel organic semiconductors. In 2018, she joined the Emerging Electronic Materials group with the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics, first at the University of Heidelberg and later moving to the Technical University of Dresden. Her research focused on the interplay between defects and the environment in perovskites for solar cell applications. Her current research interests at NIST are the investigation of charge, exciton, and ion dynamics for novel technologies based on organic semiconductors.