Biography:
From 1996-2000, Dr. Bramall worked in atomic physics designing and constructing an experiment to measure the electric dipole moment of the electron with a predicted sensitivity exceeding 10-31 e-cm using novel laser cooling and trapping techniques.
From 2000 to 2007, Dr. Bramall did Ph. D. thesis work under physicist Professor P. Buford Price at U.C. Berkeley. In this regard, Dr. Bramall worked on a variety of science and engineering projects supporting Polar research including: a series of Dust Loggers, Biospectral Loggers and scanners, the analysis of the data they produced, the IceCube Standard Candle, and a variety of biological problems revolving around the in situ metabolism of microorganisms within a matrix of ice. The dust loggers are borehole-logging tools designed to rapidly measure the in situ dust concentration of polar glacial ice down to depths exceeding 3 km and temperatures below -40 °C. The Biospectral Loggers and Scanners are instruments designed to detect biomolecules (e.g. proteins, free amino acids, chlorophyll, F420) in situ using fluorescence spectroscopy. The Biospectral Loggers were all designed to operate at polar temperatures and have been deployed in polar ice sheets to depths greater than 1,000 m, Dry Valleys ice, and alpine lakes. The biologging scanners have been developed to scan surfaces with high-resolution. The IceCube Standard Candle is an instrument that calibrates the IceCube cosmic ray detector array at the South Pole by simulating a Cerenkov event with a well-calibrated, conically-shaped laser pulse within the ice. For these projects, I designed and constructed novel small, highly-sensitive, instruments-- some working in high-pressure (>31,000 kPa), low temperature (< -40 °C) environments-- as well as designing software to interface with them and analyze their data.
Currently, Dr. Bramall is working on a number or projects, including the O/OREOS satellite, a study of snow algae at Lassen Volcanic National Park, and continuing the study of organics and fluorescence with Lou Allamandola in the Astrochemistry Group at NASA Ames Research Center.
Dr. Bramall's major publications can be found on the Astrochemistry Laboratory's Publications Pages.
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