Briefs and Posts

Prof. Zhou is part of the winning team of the DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program in 2023. The title of the awarded project is "Planetary- and Geologically-Inspired Discovery of Refractory Materials". He and other five PIs from UVA and ASU aim to use planetary-inspired and geomimetic processes to design refractory materials that will outperform existing ones. See DoD press release.

Congratulations to the University of Virginia Entrepreneurship Cup winners MSE grad students Ankita Biswas, Ho Lun Chan, Ryan Grimes and Roberto Herrera del Valle.Their concept, Hoos.ai, transforms code-based machine learning into a web app platform-based application to simplify the process of machine learning for academic and materials R&D applications. The team will develop their idea as participants in an entrepreneurship training program sponsored by the National Science Foundation I-CorpsTM site at UVA.

UVA MSE congratulates John R. Scully, Charles Henderson Chaired Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and department chair, elected member of the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine.Scully is recognized for advancing corrosion science and the durability of materials needed for a wide range of applications including energy, transportation, critical infrastructure, aerospace, communications, defense and public health.

Thermoelectric materials have been of great interest for a number of decades due to their ability to generate power, such as recycling of waste heat. Prasanna Balachandran, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering, is conducting research to deepen theoretical knowledge about polar thermoelectric materials for energy conversion technologies.Balachandran's research focuses on a polycrystalline material known by its chemical formula Ag2GeS3, which is also metastable at ambient conditions.

Lin Gao, a Ph.D. student of materials science and engineering, earned first place in The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society best paper contest for graduate students.Gao conducts research to build high-performance metallic materials using additive manufacturing as a member of the research group led by Tao Sun, associate professor of materials science and engineering.

UVA Engineering is pleased to announce that Kory Burns, Ph.D., has joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as a rising scholar research scientist, with a promotion to assistant professor of materials science and engineering on August 1, 2024.As a research scientist, Burns is working on research projects at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is using electron spectroscopy to quantify the chemical composition at the interface between two electronic materials in an effort to bring new device designs to scale for integrated circuits.

University of Virginia alumna Rebecca Schaller earned her Ph.D. in materials science and engineering in 2016, working with John R. Scully, Charles Henderson Professor of materials science and engineering and chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.For her dissertation, she developed techniques to measure hydrogen concentrations and interactions in ultra-high-strength steels.

Congratulations to Alex Wang who was awarded the Belinda and Chip Blankenship scholarship.Wang, a rising fourth-year student of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is completing a second major in materials science and engineering. UVA Engineering alumnus (Ph.D. MSE '92) and faculty member Chip Blankenship and his wife Belinda established the scholarship to encourage rising undergraduates to pursue graduate-level studies in materials science and engineering.

Stephen McDonnell, University of Virginia assistant professor of materials science and engineering, and Costel Constantin, James Madison University associate professor of physics, have launched a research project that could lead to more responsive touch screens.They have earned a 4-VA grant to study a class of 2D materials called transparent conductors.
“Every single touch screen has these transistors,” Constantin said. “This is how the device follows your finger as you move it across the screen.”