Du, Kang, and Bi-Cheng have been chosen as the recipients of the "TMS Light Metals Division Magnesium Technology Best Paper Award - Fundamental Research" for their conference paper contribution. Congratulations! Formal presentation of the award will be made at the Magnesium Keynote Session on Monday, March 20 during TMS 2023 in San Diego, California. See photo here.

Congratulations to Du on her first-author paper published on Acta Materialia, a top journal in metallurgy and materials science! The paper is titled "Crystal structure and stability of phases in Mg-Zn alloys: A comprehensive first-principles study". This marked a milestone as this is the first Acta Mat paper which is completely led by our group.

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.

Rahim and Yuan-Chen passed their qualifying exams with flying colors! Congratulations! The PhD students from our group keep a proud record of one-time clean passes in all of their qualifying exams. The group celebrated by having dinner at the Mellow Mushroom.

Damilola Lawal, an MS student co-advised by Prof. Rich Martukanitz and Prof. Zhou, successfully defended her thesis titled "Investigation of Phase Field Modeling for the Simulation of Solidification during Additive Manufacture of High-Temperature Alloys". Congratulations! She will move to University of Pennsylvania to pursue a PhD degree in MSE. We wish her all the best!

Rahim Zaman has received the highly competitive Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) Graduate Research Fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year. He received the award based on the strength of his research proposal, its relevance to NASA, and his academic achievements. The proposal titled “Design of Ultra-High Temperature Ceramics for Oxidation Resistance” seeks to use computational thermodynamics and kinetics to study the oxidation mechanisms in ultra-high temperature ceramics.

Dr. Zhou has won the prestigious 2021 NSF CAREER Award! The title of his CAREER proposal is "CAREER: A Novel Computational Thermodynamics Framework with Intrinsic Chemical Short-Range Order". This CAREER Award is jointly sponsored by two NSF programs, Condensed Matter and Materials Theory (CMMT) and Metals and Metal Nanostructure (MMN). We thank program managers Dr. Daryl Hess (CMMT) and Dr. Judith Yang (MMN) for their kind support. We also thank the help from colleagues at UVA MSE and SEAS.

Dr. Zhou will participate in a research team to develop a High-Entropy Rare-Earth Oxides (HERO) coating for protecting refractory alloys used in turbine engines. The team is funded by the ULTIMATE program in Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Du Cheng and Chu-Liang Fu have successfully passed the PhD qualifying exams. Both of them got clean passes. Congratulations!

Rahim received the UVA Engineering Distinguished Fellowship, an award made available only to the top applicants of UVA Engineering program in their first year. Congratulations Rahim!