In 2019, materials science and engineering undergraduate Sam Christianson received the Welton Sophomore Honors Summer Apprenticeship, an award designed to provide talented students with fully funded opportunities to participate in cutting-edge research. With mentorship from MS&E Assistant Professor and Grainger Institute for Engineering fellow Jiamian Hu, Christianson worked on magnetic skyrimions, which are enigmatic quasiparticles that may someday be used as bits to store information in advanced memory and logic devices. Christianson’s project was titled, “Mechanical switching of Bloch skyrmions in a FeGe nanodisk.”