J oel Saucedo’s head is full of nuclear fusion, clean energy, fractional calculus, radioactive particles—and all that jazz.

The jazz part?

When he’s not studying physics, he plays saxophone in Georgia College & State University’s Jazz Band.

These elements all weave together into a liberal arts education at Georgia College that Saucedo credits for helping him win a prestigious nuclear physics traineeship at Duke University this summer.

“This is an environment that's ripe for cultivating new heights of passionate, multidisciplinary practitioners and future leaders in the world,” Saucedo said, “aligned with values our society is in desperate need of.”

Now, Saucedo’s working to expand the Student Research Circle through MURACE (Mentored Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors). Saucedo wants the group to be a pipeline for students who want big-impact experiences in college.

He wants to share the professional connections he’s made, emboldening others to travel to conferences and share their research too. He wants to encourage experienced undergraduates and faculty “to take new students under their wings.” Saucedo would like all students to “walk in and learn something new about themselves.”

He believes he can be a campus leader, because he understands how transformational his educational opportunities have been. Research done freshman year with Dr. Hasitha Mahabaduge was enough to make him feel an equal among other trainees and Ph.D. students at Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) in North Carolina.

Mahabaduge met Saucedo through the National Science Foundation (NSF) S-STEM Scholars program. Saucedo worked on two different research projects with Mahabaduge, meeting twice a week, even through winter break.

“Joel is the poster child for a self-driven student,” Mahabaduge said. “By the end of his freshmen year, he has presented his research at local, national and international conferences. It sure is a very rare feat for a freshmen undergraduate student.”

Saucedo was stunned and elated to learn he’d been accepted into Duke’s traineeship. Funded through the U.S. Department of Energy, the program is highly competitive with as many as 300 applications for eight spots.  

When he got the acceptance letter, Saucedo said he went “running out of the learning center screaming and about to have a heart attack.”

“The magnitude of competition for these programs is nuts,” Saucedo said. “This was so unexpected and so validating to me to keep doing what I’m doing and trusting myself and my own capabilities.”

“I’d been rejected by prestigious institutions many times before,” he said. “So, it felt unreal at first. I’m so glad I kept putting my name out there. Now I’m hungry to give back and share my experiences.”

Saucedo spent 10 weeks at Duke, housed in an apartment with a Ph.D. student. His days were filled with self-paced reading, meetings and seminars on nuclear physics. The research portion was self-motivated. Trainees were expected to work at their own pace, doing what interested them.

A project advisor guided Saucedo through his chosen project, the “LEGEND Collaboration.” It’s an international effort by 270 scientists and about 55 institutions. worldwide. The experiment operates in the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso located about a mile underground in Italy.

“My work involved programming a model to help understand the effect of radioactivity on the surface of enriched germanium detectors,” Saucedo said. “Being in one of the most shielded, radiation-sensitive facilities in the world, the caliber of experiments being done here under a normal-looking mountain in Italy have the potential to win the Nobel Prize.”

This experience is a stepping stone to other research opportunities Saucedo hopes to gain in the future.

In September, he’ll present his Duke research at the NSF S-STEM Scholar initiative in Washington D.C. He also plans to present in Maui, Hawaii in October at the joint Nuclear Physics Conference hosted by the Japanese and U.S. Governments, where they’ll vote on funding the next generation of nuclear experiments.

Next summer, Saucedo would like to get a Dept. of Energy internship researching nuclear fusion at Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory. He’d also like to research thin film photovoltaics for solar panels at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. He wouldn’t mind doing a cooperate internship with Goldman Sacs or SpaceX either to better understand the business side of things.

For a career, he'd like to work in renewable energy as an employee, researcher and, eventually, entrepreneur.

“I’m open to any opportunities that are presented to me, Saucedo said. “I chose to major in physics, because I watched one too many YouTube videos on space as a kid, and I've been hooked on science ever since.”

“Physics inspires me to dream big for humanity,” he said. “I find it fulfilling, and I want to leave a rememberable mark in the field. From solar cells to nuclear fusion—there is a need for leaders. This experience definitely changed my career path to think bigger and broader.”