Draft:Lauren McIntosh

Lauren McIntosh is an assistant research scientist in nuclear chemistry at the Texas A&M University Cyclotron Institute. She is the executive director of the Horizion-Broadaning Isotope Production Pipeline Opportunities (HIPPO) program, executive director of Texas Research Expanding Nuclear Diversity (TREND), and the managing director and science coordinator of the Center for Excellence in Nuclear Training and University-Based Research (CENTAUR) program. Her research focuses on the production of astatine-211 at the Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute, and the production of other radioisotopes via heavy ion nuclear reactions.

Education
McIntosh recieved a B.A in chemistry from Hillsdale College in 2010 and a Ph.D in nuclear chemistry at Texas A&M University in 2018 working under Sherry J. Yennello. Her dissertation "Proton-Proton Correlation Functions Using Position-Sensitive FAUST" investigated charged particles produced by nuclear reactions with Forward Array Using Silicon Technology (FAUST) to determine the relationship between proton-proton correlation functions and the density-dependent asymmetry energy in nuclear equation of state (EoS) models.

Career
After graduating from Texas A&M University, McIntosh was employed as a assistant research scientist in Sherry J. Yennelo's group. At Texas A&M, her research is heavily focused on the production of the medically-relavent radioisotope astatine-211. She also continues her research on the nuclear equations of state, which describe the relationships between temperature, pressure, density, energy, and composition of nuclei. Currently, McIntosh additionally serves as one of Texas A&M's instructors for CHEM 327 - Physical Chemistry I. She remains one of the most active assistant researchers in literature at Texas A&M University, having co-authored one or more academic articles each year since 2012.

Grants and professional affiliations
The HIPPO collaboration is funded by a grant from 2021 granted by the Department of Energy (DOE)'s Isotope Program that aims to increase research and development in the field of isotope production. The DOE isotope program also granted funding for the TREND program in 2022, which provides research opportunities in nuclear science to a broad range of people from minority backgrounds. CENTAUR is funded by a grant from the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and aims to study low-energy nuclear science using university accelerators at a number of affiliated institutions.

Nuclear caloric curves
The thermodynamical properties of nuclear systems can be explored by producing chemical samples at various excitation energies. Additionally, collisions between nuclei can occur across extensive ranges of thermodynamical conditions. By taking measurements of a sample's excitation energies at different temperatures, one can plot a nuclear caloric curve. The correlations between a sample's temperature and its corresponding excitation energy can provide a wealth of information on the reactivity and kinetics of a nuclear system. Therefore, analysis of a sample's temperature vs excitation energy measurements allows for the determination of a chemical system's dependency on system size, incident energy, and more. McIntosh has contributed to a variety of research papers detailing theoretical models of nuclear caloric curves as vessels for investigating molecular dynamics, neutron deficiency/surplus, and the EoS. In 2022, McIntosh et al. reported that the asymmetry dependence of nuclear caloric curves is independent of a system's free neutron measurements. Despite this, the temperature of nuclear systems were found to be dependent on such systems' excesses of neutrons. In comparing an array of theoretical model calculations for excitation energy, McIntosh additionally contributed to the development of new theoretical models for predicting the nuclear caloric curves of systems.