Charlotte Rodriguez spent her summer at UC Santa Barbara investigating nitinol — a nickel-titanium alloy widely used in biomedical devices, such as self-expanding heart stents. Guided by Samantha Daly, a mechanical engineering professor, and mentored by PhD candidate Andrew Christison from the Daly group, Rodriguez worked to address one of the material’s most pressing challenges — its fatigue life, which relates to the number of cycles of stress it can withstand before failure.
