News

Titanium (Ti) metal, prized for its high strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance and biocompatibility is a critical material in aerospace, defense, and medical applications, but its wider use is obstructed by excessively high costs. That’s where Materials Sciences and Metallurgical Engineering Professor Zhigang Zak Fang comes into play. A recent recipient of the prestigious Humboldt Research Award, Fang…

Ling Zang, Professor in the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Founded in London in 1841, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is the oldest scholarly society in its field and now boasts more than 54,000 members across the globe.…

Professor Jeff Bates of the Materials Science & Engineering Department at the University of Utah spoke at TEDx Bountiful 2023 on Saturday, February 4, 2023 at the Bountiful Davis Arts Center in Bountiful, Utah. Prof. Bates who works with polymer materials and biodegradable polymer materials gave a lecture titled "The Problem with Plastics." Watch Prof.…

Two students, Allison Harward (B.S., Chemical Engineering candidate) and Jon Dromey (B.S., Mechanical Engineering candidate), from Prof. Michael Simpson’s research group each received scholarships worth $10,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Nuclear Leadership program. Harward and Dromey are two of only 92 such scholarships awarded nationwide this year and the only recipients from…

In a world where renewables are the future of energy generation, researchers around the world are constantly chasing the best, most efficient technologies for each kind of clean energy source. For solar photovoltaic energy generation, solar panels use semiconductor materials to convert light into electrical power. Each material technology has a different world record efficiency…

University of Utah materials science and engineering professor Michael Simpson has received a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a method of recycling spent fuel from existing commercial nuclear power plants using molten salt. The U is one of only 12 recipients from the DOE’s ARPA-E CURIE program aimed…

Earlier this month, Allison Harward, Junior in Chemical Engineering (CE), Claire Decker, Junior in Materials Science & Engineering (MSE), and Collin Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate in Materials Science & Engineering, from Professor Michael Simpson’s Research Group were notified that they had been selected for funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s University Nuclear Leadership Program…

Congratulations to Feng Liu, Ivan B. Cutler Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, who will be named a Distinguished Professor effective July 1. He will be recognized during the university’s commencement next month. The title of Distinguished Professor is a rare and prestigious honor granted by the University of Utah to faculty who meet the…

A major environmental concern about the use of nuclear reactors is what’s left behind — the nuclear waste from spent fuel rods. Where to dispose of this waste has been the source of much controversy. But instead of just burying the spent fuel rods, what if you could somehow recycle them to be used again?…

University of Utah materials science and engineering professor Ling Zang was elected to the rank of Fellow to the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his “distinguished contributions to the research of molecular self-assembly and nanostructures, and development of optical and electrical chemical sensors for applications in public safety,…

Materials science and engineering and electrical and computer engineering Distinguished Professor Gerald Stringfellow, a former dean of the U’s College of Engineering and a pioneer in LED technology, has been elected as the latest new fellow of the National Academy of Inventors from the University of Utah’s College of Engineering. Stringfellow is one of two…

Congratulations to metallurgical engineering Distinguished Professor Jan D. Miller, who was chosen to receive The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) Fellow Award for the Class of 2022 for “outstanding contributions to the practice of metallurgy, materials science, and technology.” The award includes a lifetime membership to the society and is its top honor. According…

Remembering Raj Rajamani  It is with deep sadness we share with you the news of the sudden passing away of our beloved and distinguished colleague and friend, Professor Raj K. Rajamani on the late evening of Thursday, Aug 12. Raj, as he is affectionately called, was an outstanding intellectual mind. He was a highly skilled…

University of Utah materials science and engineering Distinguished Professor, Anil Virkar, who is also the H. Kent Bowen Endowed Chair of Materials Science and Engineering, was elected to the grade of Distinguished Lifetime Member of The American Ceramic Society. The Distinguished Life Member grade is the Society’s most prestigious level of membership and awarded in…

Increasing the visibility of roadway markings is an important task for engineers. The most popular approach for making roadway striping more visible has been to add glass beads to the surface of the roadway paint in order to cause some of the light from headlights to retro-reflect back to the car. However, when paint with…

Recent Materials Science & Engineering (MSE) Ph.D. graduate, Dr. Xiaojuan Ni, received the 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Award for The University of Utah’s College of Engineering for her dissertation titled “Growth, Electronic and Transport Properties of Two-Dimensional Materials Beyond Graphene.” Dr. Ni’s dissertation focuses on theoretical and computational studies of novel 2D quantum materials for potential…

A University of Utah team lead by Dr. Ravi Chandran, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, which includes Dr. Taylor Sparks, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering, and Dr. Wenda Tan, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering has been awarded $800,000 as the Phase-I finding form ARPA-E Ultimate program and involves the development of next generation…

Congratulations to metallurgical engineering senior, Jerry Howard (MET-E, ’21), who was recently offered a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support his planned doctoral studies at the University of Nevada at Reno. If accepted, the award will support Jerry’s stipend and tuition for three years. The total value of these awards is about $138,000.…

SALT LAKE CITY — Materials Science & Engineering Professor, Dr. Feng Liu, was named an Outstanding Referee for 2021 by the Physical Review journals. Dr. Liu is one of only 151 faculty members worldwide to be bestowed with this honor this year. This Outstanding Referee honor is a lifetime award and recognition. Instituted in 2008,…

Congratulations to University of Utah materials science and engineering professor Ashutosh Tiwari, who was elected a National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Senior Member for 2021. He is one of 63 luminaries from 36 institutions named to this year’s class and the only one from Utah. “It is a great honor to be elected to the…

In 2017, leaders at the University of Utah College of Engineering and the David Eccles School of Business recognized a vital intersection between engineering and entrepreneurship – which launched the Engineering Entrepreneurship Certificate (EEC). The unique hybrid of business, entrepreneurship, innovation and law courses has proven to be in-demand across both undergraduate and graduate engineering students.…

Donald J. Lyman, professor emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering and Bioengineering at the University of Utah, passed away last month at the age of 94. Dr. Lyman was well-known for innovative biomedical polymer science and analytical characterization, blood-contacting materials, and protein interfacial science. He began and was director of Utah’s Biomedical Engineering Center for…

The Materials Science & Engineering Department at the University of Utah is pleased to announce that Dr. Huiwen Ji will join the department as an assistant professor. She is a materials chemist working on establishing structure-property links in solid-state functional materials with an unconventional perspective. Though crystalline matters are often characterized by periodic order, of…

The threat of a deadly virus, virtual classes, isolation. In these trying times, it’s especially difficult to be a college student. Which is why the University of Utah College of Engineering has employed an in-house mental health counselor to help you navigate through what is sure to be a challenging school year. Jiabao Gao, LMHC,…

Engineers from the University of Utah’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering are working with a large team of researchers to prepare experiments for the U.S. Department of Energy’s upcoming Versatile Test Reactor to test various molten salt reactor technologies. These experiments are part of just one research project that will take advantage of the…

Dr. Pankaj Kumar, 2016 PhD from metallurgical engineering, has joined the Mechanical Engineering Department, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in July 2020. Pankaj obtained his MS in Materials Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. With a dream to make a career into academia, he moved to…

Research activities in the MRSEC Soft Materials Research Center (SMRC) that includes molecular simulation group of Prof. Bedrov have discovered an elusive phase of matter, first proposed more than 100 years ago and sought after ever since. The “ferroelectric nematic” phase of liquid crystal has been described in recent study published in the Proceedings of…

The National Academy of Inventors has released a new video about the legacy of Gerald Stringfellow, University of Utah Distinguished Professor of both electrical and computer engineering and materials science and engineering. The new video, “From Campus to Commerce,” profiles Stringfellow’s contributions to the development of light-emitting diodes, a technology that would benefit everything that…

The Department of Materials Science & Engineering is proud to announce that MSE graduates Danielle Beatty (MSE, B.S./M.S., ’20) and Ashlea Patterson (MSE, B.S., ’19) both received fellowships from the National Science Fund’s (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) to assist their continuance of graduate study and research in the field of materials science. With…

The Department of Materials Science & Engineering is proud to announce that two of its graduate students, Jarom Chamberlain and Matt Newton, have been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to receive prestigious three year Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) fellowships in the amount of $161,000 each. Both students are in Prof. Michael…