Student Clinic Team Earns First BeamNetUS Grant 

In 2024, a team of Harvey Mudd College students took on a Clinic project sponsored by NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes, an innovative radiopharmaceutical company utilizing an electron beam to produce radioisotopes for diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The students successfully designed an electronic signal-producing sensor to characterize the transverse profile of their beam and simulated energy deposition, heat transfer and electromagnetic fields to optimize the design’s operation in a high radiation and high vacuum environment. The sensor will help NorthStar adjust its beam parameters to ensure efficient power delivery and improved product quality. 

That could have been the happy end of this story, but, thanks to a new initiative by BeamNetUS, the project continued. During their research for the Clinic project, the team investigated the possibility of testing their work on the Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator (NLCTA), a 60–120 MeV high-brightness electron beam linear accelerator used for experiments on advanced beam manipulation and acceleration techniques. “We didn’t have sufficient funds in our normal Clinic budget to test at SLAC,” says Nebiyu Samuel ’25, referring to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which houses the NLCTA. That’s when Emma Snively, the director of the NLCTA beam, made them aware of a call for proposals from BeamNetUS, a new consortium of accelerator science research organizations that as part of its mission promotes and funds projects, collaborations and access to accelerator infrastructure.  

The students applied for and received the grant, the first to be offered by BeamNet US. Through the funding and with access to the NLCTA, the team was able to test their design on an accelerator with higher beam energies than with those used during the Clinic project, an exciting and unusual opportunity for undergraduate students.

“It was great!” says Samuel. “The people that were helping us through the process were super insightful throughout and made it a valuable experience for us. As far as I know, none of us on the team had ever been to SLAC before.”

The work took place successfully at SLAC in May 2025, and the team produced a manuscript which was submitted for publication over the summer. The manuscript reports on the performance of a secondary electron monitor (SEM) grid designed and manufactured by the students, used to measure the transverse profile of an MeV range electron beam. Developed for real-time diagnostics of MeV-range electron beams, this SEM grid has potential applications in both industrial and medical contexts.

“The sensor is a diagnostic one,” says Samuel. “It is used to show the shape of the beam so technicians can dial in the desired shape and size of the electron beam for a more efficient dose of radiotherapy. A medical radioisotopes company like NorthStar uses electron beams to create those radioisotopes, which are then used to help treat and diagnose cancer. Because our sensor is a diagnostic tool, it would have uses wherever high average power electron beams are used.”

The students, Nebiyu Samuel ’25, Gabriel Klinger ’25, Stephanie Allen ’25, Abigail Baxter ’25, Emily Kendrick ’26, Naomi Horiguchi ’26, Ella Allgor ’26 and Damilola Dada ’26, credit the BeamNetUS funding for the opportunity to experience new aspects of engineering that they hadn’t been exposed to before. Samuel says that the complexity of the project combined with a multitude of constraints forced the team “to reach out to a lot of experts and scientists that informed our project heavily. Because the project was so open-ended, we were able to fully flesh out our system from the user interface to the product itself, which was super enjoyable.”