Lowe awarded Marshall Plan Fellowship
Wright Lab graduate student Cecily Lowe was recently awarded the Marshall Plan Fellowship by the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation, which supports transatlantic knowledge exchange between Austria and the United States.
According to the foundation’s website, the fellowship is intended to support the mission of “promot[ing] academic mobility and deepen[ing] the transatlantic dialogue in research, while also recognizing the invaluable role our U.S. partner institutions have played over the years.”
This particular fellowship opportunity celebrates the 25th anniversary of the foundation. The website reads, “we hope this initiative will serve as both a celebration and a lasting investment in the next generation of scholars”.
Lowe will join Professor Uroš Delić’s group at TU Wien to develop a method for creating large, controlled arrays of levitated nanoparticles in ultra-high vacuum—an essential step toward advancing quantum sensing and probing collective quantum phenomena. Her project will focus on designing and integrating a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber system to precisely deliver single nanoparticles into individual optical traps without relying on background gas. This deterministic loading approach will enable scalable, clean arrays for next-generation experiments in levitated optomechanics at both TU Wien and Yale.
Lowe said, “This collaboration is an exciting opportunity to broaden my experience as an experimental physicist and explore new physics using the same levitated optomechanics techniques I work on at Yale. In Professor Delić’s lab in Vienna, I’ll gain hands-on experience creating and controlling quantum interactions between levitated nanoparticles, which will help me better characterize and reduce noise in our precision sensing and dark matter experiments at Yale.”
Lowe continued, “Collaborating internationally with leading researchers at TU Wien will also strengthen my perspective as a scientist and help build lasting connections that will shape my future career in experimental physics.”
Lowe’s advisor, associate professor David Moore, said “It is fantastic to see Cecily’s work recognized by the Marshall Plan Foundation and a great opportunity for her to travel to TU Wien to work with the Delić group. The TU Wien group is building very exciting experiments at the forefront of the rapidly advancing field of levitated optomechanics, and this unique opportunity is perfectly timed for Cecily to collaborate with the Vienna group on this work.”