Expanding knowledge through data insights

University of Florida student Trent La Sage wanted to gain experience in research and coding – so he reached out to a faculty member in the physics department at his school. That initial conversation led to a months-long collaboration with researchers at Stanford, crossing labs, disciplines, and states.

The faculty member connected La Sage with Yu Lin, a staff scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory who studies the behavior of materials under extreme conditions like high pressure and heat. In order to continue his research project over the summer, La Sage applied for the Sustainability Undergraduate Research in Geoscience and Engineering (SURGE) program, which provides students from institutions across the U.S. with mentored research experience at Stanford.

“It was a great opportunity to develop the work further and engage with Dr. Lin directly,” he said.

The project sought to tackle a common problem in materials science: Findings about certain materials are not easily accessible to other researchers.

When studies are published about materials at ambient conditions, the information can be added to a public database called the Materials Project, which helps other scientists understand and predict the properties of materials.

“But once you start applying high pressures, which is what our team is particularly interested in, those are no longer uploaded to any sort of database,” La Sage explained. No such platform exists, meaning that researchers studying materials in extreme conditions could be missing important insights.

To address this, La Sage and other scholars worked on developing a program that uses computer vision and large language models like Chat GPT to pull data from published research papers. “The program would recognize data from graphs and text, and then extract it to be used for future computational models,” he said.

The opportunity to collaborate on a large team was a highlight for La Sage, who appreciated the variety of viewpoints. He brought his own distinct perspectives to the group – both in discipline, as the only physics and astrophysics major, and in experience, having started his undergraduate education after several years in the workforce.

“It was very helpful to have people from other backgrounds. And we’ve been able to get a lot of things done that I wouldn’t have been able to get done myself,” he said.

Although the SURGE program concludes during the summer, La Sage plans to continue developing the project. Beyond this work, he is looking forward to studying condensed matter in graduate school and deepening his knowledge in the discipline.