Set to graduate in May 2026 with a major in Materials Science and Engineering, Hess has built a strong research record in sustainable polymers, gaining experience across UT, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and international labs in Germany.
The earliest nudge came from growing up around a dad who worked as a guard at Y-12. Hearing about his stories of the research there sparked a curiosity that eventually spurred her toward materials science. One of her first tastes of research came at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. There, she worked on biocomposites, mixing polymers with ground bamboo or corn to create more sustainable materials. The work solidified an interest in solving engineering problems in ways that make the world more sustainable.
When she returned to UT, she found more projects focused on sustainable composites. The thread led her to Cologne, Germany, for a DAAD internship at the German Aerospace Center. The assignment was to turn lunar dust into glass-fiber composites strong enough to build things on the moon.
The program was a leap into international research and Hess’s first time living far from home in Seymour, Tennessee. She took in everything: the travel, the international lab culture, and the group’s hyper-competitive, fully ranked, algorithm-driven foosball league. A previous researcher had coded a prediction website: you entered the players, the system made a score prediction, and you had to beat what the computer thought you’d do. If you lost badly enough, you owed the group a cake. With a score of 0-10 during one game, Hess earned her turn to bring cake.
“I made them American cheesecake with an Oreo crust,” Hess said. “They thought I burned it.” She had to guess her way through the American recipe because Germany uses metric measurements, but after some tentative bites, her group mates agreed it was good. The willingness of people from different backgrounds to make time for joy and still get serious work done together shaped how Hess thinks about international collaboration.
While she was in Germany, she took a day trip to Luxembourg with the Undergraduate Research and Fellowships’ Exploration Grant she earned to meet a potential research mentor in person. He spent an entire day showing her his lab, introducing her to senior scientists, giving her a sense of what research collaboration there could look like. That experience sealed something for her.
“I really enjoyed the Exploration Grant because it gave me confidence in where I was going to apply for Fulbright,” Hess. “I think if it hadn’t been a great experience, I would have looked elsewhere. But because I had such a good experience, it made my thought process a lot easier.”
From there, applying for a Fulbright U.S. Student Grant felt less like a leap and more like a natural next step. Now she’s applying for a Fulbright research award in Luxembourg to work on the recycling and reforming of dicyclopentadiene-based polymers—materials used in aerospace and automotive manufacturing. She wants to help transition them into vitrimers, a class of polymers that can be reshaped and reused instead of thrown away, offering a real alternative to waste-heavy end-of-life processes.
Writing the proposal for this project was “the hardest—and most validating—part,” Hess said because she had to learn an entire subfield and then prove she understood it. But it also showed her she could co-develop a research plan from scratch.
For students beginning similar applications, she pointed to one practical step that made the workload more manageable: “Reach out to your department for international researchers they know already. The researcher in Luxembourg was a connection I already had through my faculty.”
