The ancient Greeks first coined the term “krystallos” to describe both quartz and ice, which they actually believed to be different forms of the same matter. Today, in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota (UMN), Ph.D. candidate David Gasperino and Senior Research Associate Andrew Yeckel, Ph.D., working under the supervision of Professor Jeffrey Derby, are incorporating EnSight extreme 3D visualization software from CEI, Inc. of Apex, NC into a project that, much like the crystals they study, is a building block for future research.