Emily Ghosh: Working at SpaceX, and Researching Renewable Energy Technologies for a Cleaner Environment
By Chloe Cramutola
They tasked her to build a vacuum chamber she knew nothing about –– but she realized the project paired her love for physics with hands-on learning.
“I had to figure out how to fix it, and I was given a lot of autonomy as a freshman,” said Emily Ghosh, a doctoral candidate who started her PhD in 2022 at Boston University’s Materials Science and Engineering division. “I had really good lab mentors. So they made it easy to feel like I could figure it out.”
Ghosh grew up in Boston, so she spent most of her life near BU. In 2016, she graduated from the university with her bachelor’s in physics and a minor in astronomy. It took her one academic year, from 2018-2019, to receive her master’s degree in MSE.
She developed her skills in physics in her undergraduate years, researching alongside Dr. Karl Ludwig. After working with the vacuum chamber, Ghosh realized she could do more with applied physics.
“I just really liked physics,” she said. “I had a really good high school teacher in physics. And when you have a really good teacher, and they make a subject so fun, and you fall in love with it that way.”
From 2019-2022, Ghosh worked at Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.
Some of her duties included propulsion engineering and additive manufacturing, where she worked primarily with metal additive, alloy development, qualification and failure analysis for crew missions.
“It’s really fast paced, and you get to learn a lot,” said Ghosh. “You get to learn from a lot of people, you get thrown into difficult problems where you have to learn how to fix things. And it was definitely hard, but rewarding.”
She had the opportunity to help develop the qualification process, where designs have to be approved, she said, and certain properties must be met to prove that the component will survive.
“It’s a relatively new process,” Ghosh said. “So [just] making sure that there’s a standard way to identify when a part is ready to fly, or when it’s not ready to fly… my team got to do that.”
After working at SpaceX, Ghosh realized she shouldn’t get bogged down in the details.
“The main thing I learned was to make sure you have the big picture in mind,” Ghosh said. “It can get really easy to get stuck in the little details… but for the immediate problem at hand, you’ve got to think ‘big picture’ and find the thing that’s most important to tackle and work your way from there.”
Ghosh is now focused on progressing her PhD thesis, which involves solid oxide electrolysis cells, or SOECs. She conducts her research with the help of MSE Associate Division Head Soumendra Basu, Professor Uday Pal and Professor Srikanth Gopalan.
SOECs, Ghosh explained, take water and split them into hydrogen and oxygen when electricity is used.
If the cells are worked in reverse, the hydrogen and oxygen can actually be used to make electricity. In that case, the cells are reversible solid oxide cells, RSOCs. These cells are important for renewable energies, she said, because hydrogen or electricity can be made and used for energy storage in renewable energy systems.
Most renewable energy is from wind or solar sources, but the problem arises when a lot is being produced at the wrong time.
“So you’re producing wind and solar energy during the day, but you’re not really producing much, specifically with solar, during the nighttime because it’s dark,” she said. “But you actually need all the electricity during the night.
Ghosh explained that SOECs are helpful because they allow for the storage of energy within the chemical bonds.
“Then when you need the energy back, you can reverse the cell and dump out all the electricity when you need it,” she added.
This is also helpful, she said, because of the production of hydrogen, which can replace fossil fuels
Right now, Ghosh’s work is looking at and understanding how RSOCs degrade over time. She asks questions like, “What can we do or add to the system to make their lifetime longer and their efficiency higher?” and “How does that actually affect the degradation of the cells?”
“There’s certain things that are known about how the cells degrade, but not the actual mechanisms by which they happen,” she said. “So that’s what my research is right now. Investigating mechanisms of degradation.”
While she is focusing on renewable energy on Earth, her interest in space and astronomy keeps her wondering, “How do you develop more renewable energies for space travel?”
Still, she said she’ll continue working on the ground her feet stand on –– making energy more accessible for everyday people.
“That’s actually why I liked working at the national labs too, because I think they really care more about trying to develop systems that are… accessible,” said Ghosh. “You can have all these different topics that are really fancy and they’re very niche, but at the end of the day, something needs to be available to the common person.”
From 2016-2018, Ghosh also worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
“It’s really fun working at national labs,” she said. “It’s really different from academia because you get to contextualize what you’re working on [in real-world applications].”
When she’s not researching, she’s teaching and mentoring.
As an undergraduate Learning Assistant, Ghosh taught electromagnetism classes for engineers and pre-med students.
“As a sophomore college student, that was a little bit terrifying, but I really liked it,” she said. “And I kept teaching for that, and that kind of went into the mentorship program that we started in the physics department.”
Before she started the physics mentorship program, she said, there was little guidance for how to navigate physics along with the transition from high school to college.
“In a classroom, it’s really hard but key to have the push to make it equal –– to give everybody that opportunity and have everything be equitable,” she said. “If that means trying to have different ways of conveying that information to students, that is really important.”
Now, Ghosh grades and runs discussion sections for the Kinetics and Materials class as a Supplemental Instructor.
She is also the president of the BU Materials Science and Engineering Graduate Students Association. After finding that the program was on hiatus, she decided to bring it back to life –– to show others what the division is all about.
It is the student chapter for two of the main research and professional organizations in Boston, Materials Research Society and American Society of Materials International. Ghosh is also on the board for the professional ASM International Boston chapter.
She strives to connect students with research and industry professionals and BU MSE alumni through MSE-GSA and ASM Boston.
“I really love the idea of having a community where you don’t feel alone and where you feel supported,” she said. “We are a small [division], we’re tight-knit, so let’s give people a chance to know about things, and not isolate ourselves from the rest of the school.”