Stronger than a locomotive, mentorship powers WVU student’s krypton research
September 15, 2025
During his first semester at West Virginia University, Sam Stalnaker felt bewildered and a little overwhelmed when he started working in Oleg Jefimenko Distinguished Professor Earl Scime’s physics and astronomy lab.
Born and mostly raised in central California before completing high school in the green forests of Webster County, Stalnaker had arrived at WVU “with no physics knowledge at all,” he said.
“Asking the graduate students in Earl’s lab the same question a hundred times is what really helped. I had to wrap my mind around what was happening in the research, but also figure out fundamental things like how all the lab equipment worked. Slowly, I started building up the information I needed to understand the experiments.”