John DeFeo, 2025 Mather Policy Intern - NIST

Biography

SPS Chapter: Michigan State University
Hello! My name is JJ DeFeo, and I am going into my Junior year at Michigan State University. I am a triple major in Political Theory, Physics, and Philosophy of Science, with minors in “Science, Technology, Environment, and Public Policy”, and “Philosophy and Law”. I am from southeastern New Hampshire and am very excited to spend my summer in DC working at NIST as one of the Mather Science Policy Interns. I am very passionate about combatting science skepticism in policymaking and in the social science side of academia.
At MSU, I am class president, president of MSU Star Wars Club, a JMC Student Senator, a member of the MSU Dodgeball Team. Outside of just school, I am extremely involved with politics on all levels, having worked for multiple competitive congressional campaigns, with several other campaign experiences.After I graduate, I want to pursue a PhD in Public Policy with a focus on Science Policy Studies, studying how science succeeds and fails to interact with public affairs.

Internship

Host: Mather Policy Intern - NIST

Internship Blog

Week 1: Sidewalks AND bike lanes!?

Hello to everyone reading, whether you are family, friends, past or future interns, or someone who somehow stumbled upon this! My name is JJ DeFeo, and I am a student at Michigan State University, triple majoring in Political Theory, Physics, and Philosophy of Science. My hometown is Newton, New Hampshire, and I am extremely happy to be down here working and living in DC. In this blog, I am going to get off topic quite often, but I promise its worth the read and will give you a better understanding of my experiences.
This summer, I am one of the two AIP Mather Science Policy Interns, working at the National institute of Standards and Technology, within the Office of Advanced Manufacturing. Throughout the summer I will give more updates on exactly what I am doing there, but this post, I wanted to recap my first week & the things new to me being in DC.
I drove down to DC from home on Saturday, a 9 hour trip. That night, we ordered pizza for pickup, and my sister and I walked to pick it up. It amazed me just how walkable the city felt, even though i knew it was pretty walkable in my head, the feeling was amazing. PLUS, most routes have seperated, safe bike paths. I LOVE biking, and am an avid enthusiast and advocate for walkability and bikeability in urban design, so being in one of (if not THE) best places for bikeability and walkability in the united states blew my mind and just made (and still makes) me smile. Coming from a town in NH that dosent have a SINGLE sidewalk on a public road, this was a very, very welcome change. Even in East Lansing (EL, the town MSU is at), where they are “a gold rated bikeable community”, none of the bike lanes are seperated, and I have been forced off the road by cars while in a bike lane, so beinng in this amazing of an environment just is amazing.
Sunday morning, we went to move my stuff from my car up into the dorm room. It was a bit of a shock how hard it was to find parking, however it really shouldn’t have been, because I knew how car-unfriendly (thats a good thing) DC is. We eventually found street parking nearish by, and found laundry carts to move my stuff in. It is a larger suite than I was expecting, which is rather nice, as my dorm at MSU was rather small. I met my roommate, James, and we hit it off right away. Later on, James, Grace (the other Mather/NIST intern), and MJ went to this restaurant called Tonic, which is famous for their tater tots (they were pretty good). It was nice to meet some of the other SPS interns.
Monday (memorial day, so no work), my family left to head back up to NH. Later in the day I went to go move my car to long-term storage over in arlington (I need it to move my stuff back home). From there, I went shopping in Rosslyn at target for some groceries + necessities. That was a bit of an ordeal as i didnt bring large bags, so I had to use grocery bags, which you (apparently) have to pay for. Then I had to carry the plastic bags to the metro and back to the dorm, which was not an ideal situation, but it was lessons learned. Also (tangent time!) the target in Rosslyn (1 stop on the metro away) is unfathomably small and is not really all that useful. Most of what you can get there, you can get at walgreens/cvs or trader joes/whole foods, which are well within walking distance of the dorm, for not an insane amount (relative to the prices in DC overall). Later in this post i will mention the better moves.
Tuesday was our first working day; we had our orientation at AIP/SPS. We all met up on tuesday and walked in a little gaggle of interns (perhaps my current favorite phrase) to the metro station, and metroed to the AIP office (American Center for Physics DC off the metro center stop). I met all of the amazing SPS staff who made the program possible, the T&C (talent & culture aka hr) team who helped us actually get hired (lol), and we met some of the AIP executives. We also got our headshots taken, as well as group photos. The NIST Team invited us to come into the NIST office that day, but the AIP/SPS orientation ran late and they ended up telling us (us being grace and I) to just come in tomorrow (Tues). I also helped certify the election results for the SPS councils & presidents which is pretty nifty, i would say. We also did some fun activities, one of which is the classic spagetti-marshmallow tower challenge, which my team won in extravagant fashion (image at the bottom).
Wednesday was my first day of work at NIST, and we woke up early, and went to get on the metro. We went to the metro center stop to transfer to the red line which goes almost to Gaithersburg (where NIST is, there is a shuttle from that stop to NIST). Unfortunately we forgot something we needed, so had to turn back and get it. SOOOO we turned around and went back, then got back on the metro and on our way. We eventually got to the red line, and then most of the way out, the train stopped due to a problem with something for 30 minutes which would have made us late for the 9:15 shuttle, and we were supposed to catch that shuttle. Fortunately, BRAD (we love brad, he will be a recurring character so pin that name in your mind) offered to come pick us up from the metro station. We got there, and grace and I each were given guest passes until we got our permanent badges (PIV Card). We went up and immediately people were pretty quick to pop their heads in the hallway to meet us. It was really information overload with everyone saying just about anything and everything under the sun about pretty much anything you could imagine regarding pretty much everything from general new onboarding info to pretty niche topics regarding physics or manufacturing or the work of the office. However, they all (our new coworkers) were very welcoming and kind and repeated themselves a few times over time to help us catch on better. I then met with my mentor/point of contact/supervisor (supervisor isnt really the right word because the whole OAM team is there to support me, but its close enough to be worth including), Susan. Susan is the definition of caring and kind and driven by a desire to help. I eventually learned how OAM (office of advanced manufacturing) is structured (something i forgot to mention previously is that OAM is all on one floor and they have the floor to themselves), and that there are 3 divisions (491, 492, 493). I work within 492, the strategy and planning division (although the NIST directory (Innovation & Industry Services > Office of Advanced Manufacturing > Program Operations) has me listed under the 491 team for some reason). I met with Robert, our division chief, as well as Mike, the leader of OAM. They were very kind, and i had an interesting connection with Robert, as he studied political science (with a concentration in political theory (and congress)) in undergrad. I really appreciated that he understood why I think the way I think and pursue the things I do; it made me feel uniquely seen in a way that most people (particularly in professional/academic settings) don’t.
Robert and Susan assigned me my first project, which is to map out all the quantum-related activities that the NIST labs are doing, then evaluating whether they have any impact, and if so to what extent, on manufacturing (when I/they say manufacturing, you should take it in a VERY broad sense, including everything from 2/10 to 8.5/10 on a scale of 1 being completely basic research to 10 being in mass commercial production. I got only a bit of direction, and the rest was up to me. This was really the first time I have ever, in a formal setting, been trusted/enabled to just figure a process/project of this sort out and make my own judgment calls; It really made me feel pretty confident in myself and made me smile that they trusted me in that right off the bat. This isn’t busywork either, even though it might sound like it. This is information synthesis that noone has ever done before, and it will have serious implications going forward sometime in the near future, depending on various factors. The fact that my report/research is going to be used in real decisions is still something that I have to get my head around a bit, but it really makes me feel important and like what i am doing is something significant, even though I am just a cog in a MASSIVE machine.
Also, something I forgot to mention is that my background check hasnt fully gone through yet, and is stuck in some FBI office (this is apparently an issue that has happened to some others, and it took a while.) So I still have my guest badge, and will have to wait for my PIV card, but thats a bridge to cross when we get there. Closing out Wednesday, Grace and I took the shuttle back to the Metro, and went back home to shenkman hall (the dorm).
Thursday morning, we went in early and (thanks to the metro not standing still for 30 mins), got in at 8:30. It was a busy busy day, with meetings off and on all day. Firstly with Susan (who gets in early) to clarify some directions on my project, then I went to work on the project. I briefly (about 90 seconds) had to meet with AIP T&C to do my I9 Document check via MS Teams; (tangent time!) I severely dislike the microsoft office ecosystem, the google suite is better at almost everything. Teams is weird because it is trying to be like 3 things at once and it just needs to pick a lane. ANYWAYS, after that, i worked for another 2 hours until an OAM-wide lunch, which was “in honor” of Grace and I, where I talked to lots of the team members (whos names I am still trying to memorize (there are like 30)). The office catered tacos (yum), and they insisted that they pay for grace and I. Right after lunch, we had a presentation from Brad on exactly what OAM does, where it fits in the Manufacturing USA network, within NIST, etc. This is an oversimplification, but I’ll do my best to explain.
NIST is made up of labs and “extramural” offices (aka outward-facing offices, as in outside of NIST, including to the rest of the government, or external organizations). OAM is one of the extramural organizations within NIST. Manufacturing USA is a congressionally-created entity which has a LOT of funding allocated to it, and it supports institutes which are modeled after the fraunhofer institutes (definitely read that wiki article, its totally interesting!) These institutes each focus on one area of manufacturing at different levels of the manufacturing process; some topics include biofabrication, 3d printing, textiles, cybersecurity, digital twins (ultra-advanced computational simulations of processes), and much, much more. Manufacturing USA is a collaboration across several government agencies, including Commerce (NIST), Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Departments of Education, Agriculture, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Labor. OAM is a coordination office, which is responsible for bringing together all of those, as well as taking a leadership role among the agencies in terms of managing and coordinating with the institutes (although each of the institutes do have an agency which they directly report to/fall under, although they all still fall under the whole network.)
After that meeting, I had another hour of work before we had a divison 492 team meeting. They welcomed me, and jumped right in to the meeting, talking about upcoming initiatives and the like. The meeting ran a bit long, ending around 3:15. From there, I worked until 4:25, then packed up and left at 4:30 to catch the 4:35 shuttle. When I got home, my roommate James surprised me with the fact that he retrieved a pot & and pan from the bins that house useful stuff donated by previous SPS interns donated/left. We then decided to make a run to target, but not the aforementioned tiny target, but the one in pentagon city, which is a few extra metro stops away on the blue line, but was a full sized target at a mall. We went there, and the metro station exited into the mall, and we walked through it to get to the target. We started shopping when I realized i didnt have my wallet. I had to have had it exiting the metro (it had my metro card in it), but I looked everywhere in target that we walked, the path we walked to get to target, etc, and couldn’t find it. I asked mall security, but they didnt have it. James finished the shopping, and we met up and went back to the dorm. I left my contact info with mall security if they did find it. When I got back, I cancelled all my cards and ordered new ones, then with our new groceries, I made smashburgers (on grilled bagels, extra butter (they were VERY good, images below). About 90 minutes later, mall security called me saying they found my wallet, and that I could pick it up the next day. I was NOT expecting that whatsoever, but was super happy.
Friday, I worked from the AIP office in downtown DC. The office there is beautiful, with extra offices and cubicles set aside for us SPS interns. For the most part, i didnt have any meetings, just time working on my project. We all ate lunch on the roof together, then later on mid-day, I went and retrieved my wallet. I worked a bit later to make up for that time so that I was still on the 40 hours/week pace. After the work day, we had the AIP Trimble Lecture, which was given by one of the leaders of the project which a couple years ago produced the first image of a black hole. It was on how history and philosophy impacts decision-making in science, which was an amazingly fascinating topic. Afterwards, the SPS intern squad all went to (the aforementioned) Tonic restaurant (it was karaoke night, but it ended before it was my turn).
Saturday morning, i decided to go for a bike ride, and wanted to go for a while, so I went and planned a ~12 mile bike along the anacostia river just into maryland (cheverly), but once I got to the point where I would have turned towards the metro stop, I realized I had a good amount of energy left in me, so I changed my route and continued on to college park, MD (funny enough, i came within 100 yards of the old AIP office). The bike ride was beautiful, with the river being the prominent feature, but also the biking through the woods and parks being amazing, as I miss the woods back home. Once I finished the ride, I metroed back to the dorm, and James and I went out to the air and space museum not realizing that we needed reservations to get in (even though it is free). Thus, we (and we picked up another SPS intern, Zhane) went back to the dorm. We all had plans to see a movie at a theatre, but that ended up not working out, so later on, James, Zhane, Grace, Kavin (Zhane’s roommate, another SPS intern), and I watched Dune part 1 on my TV.
Overall, this first week has been amazing, and I can’t wait to see what next week holds. P.S., sorry for this being so long, I just have a LOT to say. I will try to make next week’s post shorter and more readable (I will probably fail)!

*Image descriptions at the end!*; sorry for the weird formatting, again, I HATE microsoft suite, google supremacy forever.

Imgs. 1-2, Cooking & final product of my burgers
Imgs. 3-4, my bike route + a cool picture of the washington monument I got while on my bike ride
Img. 5, the spagetti tower challenge from Tuesday
Img. 6, (left to right) James, me, grace (sitting in the back), zhane, Sunny, Kalen.
Img. 7, (front to back by row, left to right) Jenna, Naiomi, Maia, Jack Hehn (founder of the SPS internship program), Sunny, Kalen, James, MJ, Rosie, Grace, Saniya, Riley, Me, Zhane, and Kavin; at the Trimble lecture.

Week 2: I love the District Wharf.

Hello everyone! Welcome back to the JJ talks about bikes & urban planning for far too long show (shoutout to my sister River who has survived a significant amount of me yapping about people-centered urban design). I will try to keep my weekly recap quicker than last week, as that was 2,848 words, which in retrospect is too many. Thus, I am going to try to keep this mostly a couple sentences per day, with more photos!
On Sunday (the 1^st), I started out the day by working on my blog, as well as working on my community college classwork (I am taking a few community college classes because they are cheaper and why not). I decided to work from somewhere other than the dorm room, so I went to the Science & Engineering hall’s top floor and found a nice chair to work in. From there, when I got hungry, I went over to the Western Market, a really cool semi-public indoor space that has several restaurants, stores, and seating areas. I got food, ate, and continued working there. After that, I decided to explore more of campus, and found myself in several buildings including 3 different businesses buildings, another engineering building (kinda), and more. I discovered some very very cool places to study if I ever need to be really isolated.
On Monday, I went and worked at the AIP office. I continued working on my project, and met with my mentor Susan. After work, I dropped my stuff at home and went to an even I had heard about called “Profs and Pints”, which is a series of public lectures which happen in bars/social spaces with the goal of democratizing access to academics’ insights and interests. That talk was on El Salvador’s relationship with gangs, and how the state eventually took the place of and became a gang. It also touched on the US-El Salvador relationship under the current administration, but mostly focused on the gang state structure and history. I asked a question regarding how to better communicate these rather high-level, theoretical concepts which are very important to understanding various ongoing world events, to folks who are not engaged with acadamia and who are not DC people; back home, the majority of people in my county do not read beyond a 9^th grade level, and that is better than the average county. He didnt really have a good answer to that, which was a bit disappointing, because to me, an academic finding’s worth is significantly impacted by its ability to make an impact, and that is significantly impacted by the masses being able to understand it.
Tuesday, I went into NIST to work. I attended a rather high-level committee meeting of the (technically unofficial meeting due to legal technicalities with the administration going through the process of rechartering of these sort of committees) SAM, or subcommittee on advanced manufacturing. After work, I went to Trader Joe’s to restock on some groceries. I made chicken with soy sauce, white rice, and eggs for dinner, and It was fantastic, and I ate the leftovers the next day for breakfast.
On Wednesday, I went to work, met with a coworker named Don, who was very straightforward and very informative about his experiences, and was very helpful (he threw so much at me I had to start taking notes!) After work, a group of us went to the district wharf. There was a free open concert going on, yard games out, and the wharf area is pedestrian & bicycle only. It has businesses along the whole street, and along all the sidestreets. The buildings were beautiful, as was the sunset. I have repeatedly told people since that I wish the entire city was designed that way (ground level as a extremely pedestrian and bike-friendly area with walk-in business and public spaces, then 1-2 floors of office space, then 6-10+ floors of housing). That is one of the best ways to plan a city, and truly should be an inspiration for all cities. It was heavily trafficed with people the whole time, and genuinely is how I wish there was even a single city in the US planned. ANYWAYS after that, we went back to the dorm.
On Thursday, I got to present my initial draft of my report to my division. They had some great feedback that I will be working into my report before the final draft is completed. I hope to have a solid draft done on monday or tuesday. I do think that there was a bit of criticality in their comments, which is totally reasonable, as I know that not all of what I did was great and some of the decisions, especially stylistic ones, were inideal. After work, we had the AIP dinner river cruise. It was fantastic, and I met so many great people, including the incoming president of SPS, Ron, who is an MSU alum, Kiril, a professor at Cleveland State, and Don, the head of high energy physics at the department of energy. I want to especially shout out my conversations with Don, as we talked quite a lot at the end about what I want to do with my life. Afterwards, most of us went to a restaurant, where we all hung out for a while and had various amazing conversations as people all shifted around. Eventually, it ended up being Alejandro, the director of SPS, Don, Thibault (pronounced Thee-bow), a french physics PhD student, and me. After quite a while talking, including about society and urbanism, we all ubered back to Don’s neighborhood, as he said he wanted to show us around it. We got there and continued talking, and he showed us the places in his area (union market). It was very late at that point, so Thibault and I ubered back to our homes.
Friday I was very tired. I worked from the AIP office and got a bagel on the way in the morning. I was pretty relatively unproductive, but I did meet with Casey who gave Grace and I our next assignments coming up on the horizon. After work, a few of us went to TJ max, and I got a pair of new ties. That night, I knew I needed to sleep, so I took half a thing of zquil, then slept for about 13.5 hours.
Saturday, after sleeping well in, I hung out, got some community college work done, and went over to Jenna & Maia’s room (2 doors down) with James and Grace and watched the muppets 2011 movie! ALSO, I discovered the eastern half of pennslyvania avenue (from the White house to the capitol) is being re-designed and 2/3 of the proposed designs are really really good, and the other 1 is a pretty solid improvement!
Overall, this week was very tiring yet I had so, SO much fun. I am excited to see what comes next week, and I’ll see yall then!

Kermit the frog, watching the muppets movie

A nice photo I took from the cruise on thursday, as the route circled right in front of the DCA airport

a pretty neat sunset photo I got at the wharf on wednesday.

A photo of my chicken and white rice and eggs!

Week 3: I have too many tabs

Hi everyone!
This week was very, very busy and I am typing this blog post just before its due, so its going to be a bit shorter and high level with some more pictures instead of words.
Sunday, i made myself french toast. I met up with a friend from MSU (who is on the dodgeball team with me) who’s in DC, and we went to the national postage museum, via union station. The train station was honestly more impressive than the museum, but both were cool.
Monday, I did a 1-on-1 with someone from the OAM office, and attended the NIST town hall virtually. After work, I went to the gym with some of the other SPS interns. Later, I went back to the previously mentioned series of professors talks for something about the history of revenge. I also tried SPAM for the first time, and it was pretty good.
Tuesday, I toured the NIST net-0 house experiment, which I personally thought had very bad experimental design. I also got trained on the Makerspace, and did a meeting with Casey about modern makers. Later that night, James and I went to the national mall at night which was cool.
Wednesday, I had a lot of time to lock in and work on my project, which will be finished monday.
Thursday, I attended the OAM start of summer picnic, which was great, but I had to leave early to get to the NIST autonomous robot test facility, which was VERY VERY cool. I discussed it all a lot with the project leader, Adam, and he was very informative and positive-minded. I then had back-to-back meetings with my division then whole-OAM meetings. When we got home, some of us went to the national mall and threw a football around (among other balls i brought to play with).
Friday, I just tried to lock in and finish my report, which I didnt complete, but almost did.
Saturday was parade day in DC, so I tried to stay as far away from that as I could. I went grocery shopping with james, and the city was empty relative to normal. James and I later watched dune 2 with grace and riley.
Sorry that this is so short and not detailed, but I have to head to bed 🫡

Week 4: busy busy

Hello everyone!
This week’s blog post is also going to be very short, just covering the top level events.
Sunday I didnt do too too much. Monday I went to work, and worked late to (drumroll please) complete my first draft of my quantum project!!!!!!!!! Yay! After that, we were going to go to trivia at tonic, but it was packed and so we hung out at shenkman and got cookies.
Tuesday I went into NIST, and on the train ride saw some pretty wacky dancers who danced for one stop length.
Wednesday, all of the SPS interns came to NIST for a tour given by me, grace, and (primarily) the wonderful Brad (as well as my mentor susan, Kimmai, and the AAAS fellows Ami and Joseph). We had opening remarks by a few important people, including Mike Molnar, the leader of OAM. We then saw the NCNR, the neutron nuclear reactor instrumentation on the NIST campus which was super cool. We also saw the Anechoic chamber, which was amazingly tranquil and was mind-boggling and super super neat. We also went on a tour of the NIST museum/library and saw clones of newton’s apple tree. Overall, it was fantastic.
Thursday was juneteenth, so no work, but I visited the smithsonian air and space museum, which was AMAZING!! So many cool space artifacts and exhibits (and the planes were pretty cool too). Later on I also visited the lincoln memorial. I also had a random encounter with a friend from JMC/MSU, which was neat (shoutout Josephine!)
Friday, some of us hung out after work. I met a really nice guy named thomas, but nothing too too eventful happened.
Saturday, I ended up going on a very long walk in the evening, then metro’ed back to shenkman.
Sorry that this is so short and not super detailed, but I need to head to bed! As the old adage goes, pictures are worth a thousand words.

(obligatory shoutout to good urban planning!) having the sidwalk effectively extended out to the end of the on street parking lane, especially with the painting+pottery+pylons) forces drivers to take turns sharper, which slows them down and makes pedestrians much more visible, which greatly increases pedestrian safety!!