2024 Rising Innovator

Madeline

Lockhart

Madeline Lockhart graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Texas Tech in 2020. As a member of President's Select, she could be spotted leading prospective students through campus telling tales of Texas Tech, or sporting red and black on the sidelines at football games while hosting athletic recruits. She shared her love of math and science while working as a tutor in the Student Disability Services Center for two years.

Lockhart was a proud member of the Texas Tech Honors College. As a freshman, she participated in undergraduate research in High Energy Physics and served as a mentor through the Bayless Elementary Mentoring Program. During her sophomore year, she was named the 36th Goldwater Scholar in TTU history. Upon graduation in 2020, she was selected as the 2020 Honors College Student of the Year.

In the fall of 2019, Lockhart represented Texas Tech in Washington D.C. as part of the Texas Tech Congressional Internship Program and earned a minor in political science. She secured an internship at the Department of State in the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance and interfaced with government agencies and think tanks on issues related to arms control, nonproliferation, chemical/biological/nuclear weapons, and relevant international treaties.

Lockhart was born and raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico. After her junior year of high school, she worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Nuclear Engineering and Nonproliferation Division; first, as a high school co-op intern and later returning as an undergraduate research assistant during the summers while attending Texas Tech. Under the mentorship of Dr. Daniela Henzlova, she published her first peer-reviewed journal article in 2017. Over the years, her research activities have generally included radiation modeling, neutron detection, data analysis, and characterization of nuclear materials. In the summer of 2019, she participated in the Robert Keepin Nonproliferation Science Summer Program.

Currently, Lockhart is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University, advised by Dr. John Mattingly. She was awarded a Nuclear Nonproliferation and International Safeguards (NNIS) fellowship by the National Nuclear Security Administration in 2021. She is working with a multi-university, multi-laboratory team to develop new neutron multiplicity counting methods to assay uranium-233 and -235 in mixed oxide nuclear fuel materials. As an NNIS fellow, she recently spent six months performing research at the European Commission's Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy. She is an executive committee member for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division of the American Nuclear Society and an advisory board member for the Texas Tech College of Arts and Sciences.

Lockhart's other activities include traveling, cooking pink foods, CrossFit, and managing SKANZ, a digital business card and networking platform that she founded in 2021.

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