X-ray optics and microscopy research with Prof. Chris Jacobsen 1.   X-ray fluorescence microprobe analysis: We help Stephen Baines, Ben Twining, and Nick Fisher in the Marine Sciences Department at Stony Brook with their use of a focused x-ray microprobe system at Argonne National Laboratory. The goal of their project is to quantify metal concentrations in phytoplankton to better understand the role of metals as contaminants and as biotic limiters in the open ocean. Stephen Baines has developed curve-fitting procedures to improve the quantification of the data, but his procedures run under MatLab whereas both our group and Argonne use a different software package called IDL. The project is to implement spectrum curve fitting in IDL and thus participate in the data analysis. Good math and physics skills are more important than computer skills at the outset, but this project centers primarily on writing programs for data analysis. 2. Infrared spectromicroscopy analysis: For our own work in soft x-ray microscopy, we have developed programs to do principal component analysis and cluster analysis (or pattern matching) to deal with the three-dimensional data one obtains (X, Y, photon energy). There is also quite a bit of interesting work being done at Brookhaven Lab on infrared spectromicroscopy, where one can do chemical "fingerprinting" on a 10 micrometer size scale, and this work is applied to areas including the study of bone growth and structure. It would be very interesting to extend our existing analysis methods to deal with infrared spectromicroscopy data. October 2003