Congratulations to Du Cheng (first graduated PhD student from the CTK group) for winning the 2022 Acta Student Award for her primary contribution to the manuscript, “Atomic structures of ordered monolayer GP zones in Mg-Zn-X (X= Ca, Nd) systems”. The Acta Student Award is one of the highest honors for a graduated PhD studying materials/metallurgy. Job well done, Du!

Rahim, Chu-Liang, and Prof. Zhou had a blast in the CALPHAD 2023 meeting at MIT. Chu-Liang won the FactSage Best Student Poster Award with his poster titled "A Cluster-Based Computational Thermodynamics Framework with Intrinsic Chemical Short-Range Order: Applications to Prototype Systems". Job well done!

Rahim's Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) fellowship got renewed for the 2023-2024 academic year. Congratulations! He was invited to the luncheon hosted by President Jim Ryan and gave a presentation titled "Design of Ultra-High Temperature Ceramics for Oxidation Resistance" in the VSGC conference.

The CTK group had a farewell dinner for Kang and Du. They both received engraved Jefferson's Cups from Prof. Zhou as gifts. Kang will become an associate professor in the department of materials science and engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Du will take a short break and find a job in Shanghai. Thank you for your great contributions in the past 5 years, Kang and Du! We wish you all the best for your new life in Shanghai.

Prof. Zhou and Yuan-Chen participated in the TMS 2023 conference in San Diego, CA. Prof. Zhou was involved in the organization of an honorary symposium and a dinner party for his PhD advisor Prof. Zi-Kui Liu. We had great fun meeting old and new friends there!

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 Chu-Liang for winning the STT (Stiftelsen för Tillämpad Termodynamik) scholarship from the Foundation for Applied Thermodynamics in Sweden! The scholarship will cover Chu-Liang's registration and travel costs for attending the CALPHAD 2023 conference to be held at MIT in Boston.

Congratulations to Du for successfully defend her PhD thesis today! The committee is impressed by the well-put-together thesis, which is titled "First-Principles Investigation of Crystal Structures and Stabilities of Precipitates in GP Zones-Strengthened Mg Alloys". Job well done, Dr. Cheng! Du is the first PhD graduated from the CTK group.