No one could be more astonished to find Ciara Sivels ’13 where she is today than Ciara Sivels herself. “Never in a million years would I have predicted that I’d be working as a nuclear engineer in a major research laboratory,” says Sivels. “My original dream was to be a pastry chef.” Instead, Sivels, who grew up in rural Virginia, went to MIT and majored in nuclear science and engineering with a focus on nuclear nonproliferation, and a concentration in middle school education. She then earned a PhD from the University of Michigan in nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, where she was the first African-American woman to graduate from this program. Today, Sivels is on staff at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), engaged in projects related to national security. While details about her research remain classified, Sivels can reveal that she works on radiation transport simulations focusing on materials effects: “In lay terms, I look at how radiation interacts with and changes the properties of various types of materials.”...