This coming Thursday, national award-winning Assistant Professor of Physics Ania Bleszynski Jayich will kick-start the Open Breakfast Club guest speaker series at Anacapa School in Santa Barbara with a lecture discussing her research in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and its various real-life applications.

Jayich is a nationally recognized researcher in the field of nanoscale MRI and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers — the highest honor President Barak Obama provides to American scientists — earlier this year. In 2010, Jayich was awarded an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator grant that funded much of her current research, which Jayich said also has lasting impacts on the fields of structural biology and materials sciences.

Anacapa School is an independent, college preparatory school for students in grades 7 through 12 and is hosting the second season of its year-long multidisciplinary speaking series, which hosts guest lectures every month.

The primary purpose of the lecture is to provide junior high and high school students with unique insight into physics that could not be attained in most conventional classroom settings, according to Jayich.

“One thing that I think is important is to show them physics beyond what they learn in high school physics classes,” Jayich said. “It’s very much a discipline that you have to build upon [so] certainly the classes are important, but high school classes are often not inclusive of cutting-edge research.”

Jayich and her team of researchers are currently working to create 3D images of macromolecules such as proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acids and lipids. Through MRI technology, this project would provide new perspectives on molecules that carry out the most crucial cellular functions of an organism.

Anacapa School was founded in 1981 and is located at 814 Santa Barbara Street. The talk will begin at 7:50 a.m.

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