Congrats to Laura on passing her defense!

If you’ve been looking at our website recently, you may have noticed a pretty big change in the “Team” section: our own Laura Wendelberger has successfully defended her PhD thesis and will soon be graduated from NC State! Yay!

Check out the kind of work Laura completed with these slides, admittedly just a small sample from her defense!

Laura came to us in December 2020 as a PhD candidate from the stats department, and at the time had little knowledge of remote sensing. But that didn’t hinder her whatsoever, and ever since she started helping with the MUTATED project, she has become an integral part of SEAL. While we all were very appreciative of her statistics knowledge helping to guide all members of the lab, we also enjoyed having her sense of humor and random donut runs, as well as her connections to certain cinnamon roll shops in the Outer Banks.

Though we wish she could stay on as a lab member and advisor, Laura has more exciting things coming up. Specifically, she is setting her sights on a new postdoctoral research appointment in the Applied Statistics group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In sunny northern California, she’ll be working with materials scientists to predict metal strength by using physics-based models along with statistical techniques, such as model selection and Bayesian hierarchical modeling.

We wish Laura the best of luck on her adventures and we hope her new team appreciates her as much as we do!