March 27, 2024: Professor Andre Mkhoyan was chosen for his contributions to the understanding of electron beam channeling, quantification of imaging and spectroscopy in STEM, & for his discovery of fundamentally new behavior in crystal point and line defects using STEM.
March 14, 2024: Professor Kevin Dorfman and Ben Magruder have written a primer on the theory of block polymer self-assembly for ACS In Focus. The EBook is a primer intended as an introduction to Self Consistent Field Theory (SCFT), and includes some introductory material on polymer thermodynamics and self-assembly as well as some great video interviews! Read the EBook entitled, "Theory of Block Polymer Self-Assembly" on the ACS IN FOCUS website.
February 15, 2024: Assistant Professor Michelle Calabrese is among twelve recipients of the 2024-2026 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. This University-wide program seeks to advance the careers of the most promising junior faculty members who have potential to make significant contributions to their departments and scholarly fields. Recipients were chosen based on merit, professional promise, quality of publication record, and originality and innovation in research achievements. Congratulations Michelle!
February 7, 2024: Regents Professor Tim Lodge and former MRSEC Director, is among two University of Minnesota Professors elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024. This is among the highest professional distinctions awarded to an engineer. The NAE elected only 114 new members and 21 foreign members this year. Six University of Minnesota alumni were also elected to NAE this year. Congratulations Tim!
December 11, 2023: Phil is among six Outstanding Service Award winners in the College of Science and Engineering (CSE). In his role, Phil has been responsible for overseeing a set of programs aimed at increasing the overall STEM workforce. These include Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) programs and Research Experience for Teachers (RET) programs. Phil was key in acquiring resources to aid in running these programs. Many of these programs led to the application of students to U of M graduate programs. He has also participated in many other activities that amplify the impact of the MRSEC on educational activities in the K-16 space across the U.S. Phil has done all of this with an exceptional level of professionalism.
November 3, 2023: In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Dorfman Group from CEMS introduced an innovative computational method for uncovering new block polymer phases. By integrating generative adversarial networks (GANs) with polymer self-consistent field theory (SCFT), the team successfully discovered hundreds of new block polymer candidate phases.
This research was conducted by graduate student Pengyu Chen, under the guidance of Prof. Kevin Dorfman. The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided financial support through the UMN Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), with computational resources provided by the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.
Read the full paper entitled, "Gaming self-consistent field theory: Generative block polymer phase discovery" on the PNAS website.
October 17, 2023: In a surprising new study, researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have found that the electron beam radiation that they previously thought degraded crystals can actually repair cracks in these nanostructures.
This work was supported primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Parts of this work were carried out at the UMN Characterization Facility. Computational resources were provided by the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) and film growth was supported by the Department of Energy (DOE).
Read the full paper entitled, "Mending cracks atom-by-atom in rutile TiO2 with electron beam radiolysis" on the Nature Communications website.
October 6, 2023: Assistant Professor Michelle Calabrese is among 35 recipients of the 2023 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) 35 Under 35 Award.
The award recognizes chemical engineering professionals who have made great contributions to the field and to AIChE. The recipients were selected for their achievements and contributions in one of seven different categories: bioengineering, chemicals and materials, education and outreach, energy and environment, innovation and entrepreneurship, leadership, and safety. Calabrese was honored for her contributions in the chemicals and materials category. Her research group employs rheology, soft matter physics, and polymer and nanoparticle synthesis to address a range of fundamental and applied problems in polymer and soft materials engineering. She hopes her research group will be recognized both for their scientific contributions and their efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
September 22, 2023: Sreejith Nair, a fourth-year chemical engineering graduate student in Professor Bharat Jalan's research group, recently won an Outstanding Student Talk Award at the 37th North American Conference on Molecular Beam Epitaxy (NAMBE) 2023. The conference is a prominent international forum for reporting scientific and technological developments in Molecular Beam Epitaxy research.
September 12, 2023: Regents Professor Frank Bates is among the recipients of the 2024 national awards administered by the American Chemical Society (ACS). Bates won the ACS Award in Applied Polymer Science, sponsored by Eastman Chemical. The national awards encourage the advancement of chemistry in all its branches, support research endeavors, and promote the careers of chemists. Recipients will be honored at an award ceremony on Tuesday, March 19, 2024, in conjunction with ACS Spring 2024 in New Orleans.
August 8, 2023: Silu Guo, a fourth-year materials science and engineering Ph.D. candidate in Professor Andre Mkhoyan's (IRG-1) research group, recently won a First Place Physical Sciences Poster Award at the 2023 Microscopy & Microanalysis meeting, which consisted of a monetary award and certificate.
July 13, 2023: A University of Minnesota Twin Cities team has, for the first time, synthesized a thin film of a unique topological semimetal material that has the potential to generate more computing power and memory storage while using significantly less energy. The researchers were also able to closely study the material, leading to some important findings about the physics behind its unique properties.The study is published in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that covers the natural sciences and engineering.
June 23, 2023: The Department of Chemistry hosted sixteen high school teachers earlier this week for a three-day Green and Sustainable Chemistry workshop funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) UMN Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) and the NSF Research Experience for Teachers (RET) Program. The workshop aims to provide high school teachers with tools to integrate green and sustainable chemistry into their classrooms. This is the sixth year UMN Chemistry has hosted the workshop, which has now served more than 100 high school instructors.
June 21, 2023: Distinguished McKnight University Professor Ilja Siepmann recently received the 2023 John M. Prausnitz Award. The citation reads: “for profound contributions to molecular modeling of physical properties and phase equilibria, through development and application of robust, transferable intermolecular potentials, novel molecular simulation methods, and service to this community.” The John M. Prausnitz Award, established in 1998, is presented triennially by the International Conference on Properties & Phase Equilibria for Product & Process Design (PPEPPD).
June 21, 2023: University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering Professor Bharat Jalan has received the prestigious Schieber Prize from the International Organization of Crystal Growth in recognition of his scientific leadership and pioneering work in developing the hybrid molecular beam epitaxy growth technique.
June 09, 2023: It’s official: more than 100,000 students in the Twin Cities metro area have engaged with chemistry through the biannual Energy and U program. With the completion of the May 2023 series, the interactive show – which teaches third, fourth, and fifth graders about the First Law of Thermodynamics – surpassed this major education milestone. Energy and U is funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s UMN Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC).
June 08, 2023: MRSEC IRG-1 team, led by Chris Leighton and Xiaojia Wang, discovered a new method for tuning the thermal conductivity of materials to control heat flow "on the fly.” Their tuning range is the highest ever recorded among one-step processes in the field, and will open a door to developing more energy-efficient and durable electronic devices.
The researchers’ paper is published in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering the natural sciences. Read the full paper entitled, “Wide-range continuous tuning of the thermal conductivity of La0.5Sr0.5CoO3-δ films via room-temperature ion-gel gating,” on the Nature Communications website.
May 30, 2023: Ben Magruder and Rohan Chakraborty, chemical engineering graduate students, received 2023 IPRIME poster awards at the spring IPRIME Annual Meeting
May 22, 2023: A University of Minnesota Twin Cities-led team (Jalan/Nair, IRG-1) has developed a first-of-its-kind, breakthrough method that makes it easier to create high-quality metal oxide thin films out of “stubborn” metals that have historically been difficult to synthesize in an atomically precise manner. This research paves the way for scientists to develop better materials for various next-generation applications including quantum computing, microelectronics, sensors, and energy catalysis.
May 15, 2023: MRSEC student Rashmi Choudhary (Jalan/Mkhoyan, IRG-1) is among the 2023-2024 Doctoral Dissertation Fellows. The Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (DDF) gives the University's most accomplished PhD candidates an opportunity to devote full-time effort to an outstanding research project by providing time to finalize and write a dissertation during the fellowship year. Congratulations!
March 31, 2023: Assistant Professor Michelle Calabrese is among 25 awardees named as 2023 Early Stage Investigators by the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering (PMSE). The awards seek to recognize early career scientists and emerging leaders who have had a significant impact on the field of polymer science and engineering across academia, industry, and national labs.
March 23, 2023: Associate Professor Vivian Ferry (IRG-1, IRG-2) and Professor Christy Haynes (Seed) were awarded a $225,000 grant for their research proposal "Selective detection of chiral pesticides with plasmonic metasurfaces using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy" from the International Institute for Biosensing (IIB), a new globally-engaged institute at the University of Minnesota focused on advancing biosensing research.
This spins off Christy Haynes' MRSEC Seed project "Photonic Properties of Chiral Nanostructures". The project is a collaboration with Ping Wang, and aims to develop a new sensing platform that will detect and differentiate chiral pesticides.
March 15, 2023: Assistant Professor Michelle Calabrese has been selected by the Division of Polymer Physics (DPOLY) of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Polymer Physics Group of the Institute of Physics in the United Kingdom (UKPPG) for the 2023 UKPPG/DPOLY Polymer Lecture Exchange. She will serve as the DPOLY representative to the UKPPG and present her research at the 2024 UK Polymer Physics Group Physical Aspects of Polymer Science Meeting on September 11–13, 2024 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Established in 2009, the UKPPG/DPOLY Polymer Lecture Exchange honors faculty members in the early stages of their careers.
March 9, 2023: Professor Rafael Fernandes (IRG-1) has been named a 2023 Distinguished McKnight University Professor. The Distinguished McKnight University Professorship program recognizes outstanding faculty members who have recently achieved full professor status. Recipients hold the title “Distinguished McKnight University Professor” for as long as they remain employed at the University of Minnesota.
February 7, 2023: NAE membership is given to those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice, or education. Lozano and the 2023 cohort will be formally inducted at the NAE Annual Meeting in October.
"Karen Lozano, Julia Beecherl Endowed Professor, Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, Texas. For contributions to nanofiber research and commercialization, and mentoring of undergraduate students from underserved populations."
— NAE statement on Lozano's election
January 28, 2023: Rashmi Choudhary, a fourth-year materials science graduate student in the Jalan group, has won the prestigious Ovshinsky Student Travel Award to participate in the 2023 American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting, sponsored by the Division of Materials Physics. Choudhary will present her work on developing a novel molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) technique for atomically-precise synthesis of SrIrO3 films, a widely studied material owing to its strain-dependent electronic transport properties, large catalytic activity toward oxygen evolution reaction, and exotic quantum behavior.
January 18, 2023: Mauricio De Leo (MRSEC, CEMS) and Zach McAllister (CEMS), won the competition and split $2,000, with their pitch for "Greener Forward: A sustainable energy storage solution." By powering an ammonia microplant using wind energy during low demand periods, energy can be stored in the form of ammonia for it to be later used as a fuel source as needed. The process increases the yield of ammonia per unit energy by allowing a lower pressure, lower energy conversion relative to the Haber Bosch process thanks to a Mg-based selective ammonia absorbent. Mauricio is a current "UMN MRSEC Graduate Fellow in Honor of Frank Snowden", and a former MRSEC REU student.
January 4, 2023: RIO GRANDE VALLEY, TEXAS – The Spanish adaptation, “Energía Y TÚ, is a collaborative film that includes chemical demonstrations and natural connections between energy and STEM education. UMN CSE "Energy and U" faculty also received EMMY® Awards for their contributions: Aaron Massari (Chem, Energy and U Director), Frank Bates (MRSEC IRG-2), Marc Hillmyer (Chem), and David Blank (MRSEC Education Director). The Lone Star EMMYs® took place in Dallas on Nov. 12, 2022, and are the Texas Chapter of the Emmys, overseen by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS).
January 04, 2023: For the past twelve years, Reineke has served the ACS journal portfolio through a number of positions. Her first editorial advisory board invitation was from Bioconjugate Chemistry, which she has served on since 2010. Read more via the title link, including an interview on ACS Axial.
January 4, 2023: New work appearing in Nature has uncovered unusual and appealing superconducting properties realized in bilayer MoTe2. This two-dimensional semimetal is formed by stacking two atomically thin layers of MoTe2 in a specific non-centrosymmetric configuration that allows for a phenomenon called ferroelectricity to emerge. This is already surprising, because ferroelectricity is most commonly found in insulating compounds. Even more surprisingly, superconductivity appears together with ferroelectricity, which opens the door for unique and powerful ways to control this quantum state of matter, characterized by electric currents being transmitted without dissipation.
October 17, 2022: Leighton brings wealth of experience and an international reputation. University of Minnesota Twin Cities Professor Chris Leighton has been appointed by College of Science and Engineering Dean Andrew Alleyne as the new director of the National Science Foundation-sponsored Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC).
September 6, 2022: MRSEC graduate student Supriya Ghosh (Mkhoyan, IRG-1) has been awarded the Richard D. Amelar and Arthur S. Lodge Fellowship for Outstanding Collaborative Research in Materials for 2022-23. This award is given to a student whose research interests encompass the overlapping scope of chemistry and chemical engineering and materials science.
August 25, 2022: Professor Rafael Fernandes (IRG-1) performs during Physics Force shows at the Minnesota State Fair.
August 17, 2022: Professor Theresa Reineke (IRG-2) has been named a Prager Chair in Macromolecular Science in the University's Department of Chemistry. The chair is one of two established by the late chemistry Professor Emeritus Stephen Prager and the late Dr. Julie Prager.
June 27, 2022: The Department of Chemistry hosted eighteen high school teachers from Minnesota, South Dakota, and Maine for a three-day workshop (June 20-22) with the goal of learning how to integrate green and sustainable chemistry into their classrooms. The workshop was funded in part by MRSEC, and the Researcher Experience for Teachers (RET) Program
May 12, 2022: MRSEC graduate students John Dewey (Leighton/Jalan, IRG-1) and Grace Kresge (Calabrese, IRG-2) were selected as recipients of the first annual CEMS Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Action and Service (IDEAS) Awards. The awards recognize various contributions to the constant betterment of the shared CEMS community.
May 12, 2022: MRSEC second-year graduate student Mahmoud Matar Abed (Haynes, Seed) has been awarded a GEM Fellowship from the National GEM Consortium. The GEM Fellowship program promotes the participation of underrepresented groups in post-graduate science and engineering education and the technical workforce.
April 29, 2022: MRSEC student Grace Kresge (Calabrese, IRG-2) is among the recipients of the 2022 President's Student Leadership and Service Awards (PSLSA). These awards honor outstanding students for their invaluable leadership and service to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and the community.
April 29, 2022: MRSEC students Will Postiglione (Leighton/Greven, IRG-1) and Supriya Ghosh (Mkhoyan/Jalan, IRG-1), are among the 2022-2023 Doctoral Dissertation Fellows. The Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (DDF) gives the University's most accomplished PhD candidates an opportunity to devote full-time effort to an outstanding research project by providing time to finalize and write a dissertation during the fellowship year. Congratulations!
April 21, 2022: MRSEC first-year graduate student Casey Wouters (Haynes, Seed) will receive three years of financial support including an annual stipend of $34,000 and a cost of education allowance of $12,000 to the institution. Fellows also benefit from opportunities for international research and professional development, and the freedom to conduct their own research at any accredited U.S. institution of graduate education they choose.
April 8, 2022: MRSEC alumna Sanja Hameed (Leighton/Greven, IRG-1) received the Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA) prize for Outstanding Student Research for elucidation of magnetism and plastic deformation effects in perovskite titanates via neutron scattering and complementary techniques. Each of the prize winners will speak at the American Conference on Neutron Scattering (ACNS) 2022. Congratulations, Sanja!
March 9, 2022: Assistant Professor David Poerschke (Seed) is among ten recipients of the 2022-2024 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. This University-wide program seeks to advance the careers of the most promising junior faculty members who have potential to make significant contributions to their departments and scholarly fields. Recipients were chosen based on merit, professional promise, quality of publication record, and originality and innovation in research achievements.
February 26, 2022: Bhaskar Das (Leighton, IRG-1) was recently awarded a prestigious American Physical Society (APS) Physics Division of Materials Physics (DMP) Post-Doctoral Travel Award. The DMP Post-Doctoral Travel Awards were established to recognize innovative materials physics research by Post-Doctoral researchers that will be presented at the APS March Meeting.
January 10, 2022: Assistant Professor Michelle Calabrese (IRG-2) has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support her project: Beyond alignment: on novel mechanisms for controlling block copolymer phase behavior using magnetic fields. This prestigious award provides support for junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.
December 22, 2021: Associate Professor Vivian Ferry (IRG-2, IRG-1 Collaborator) is a member of the 13-person inaugural Editorial Board of the journal, Physical Review X Energy (PRX Energy) and will serve on the Board for a three year term.
December 14, 2021: Professor C. Daniel Frisbie (IRG-1) reached the Chemistry of Materials’ 1k Club (articles published in Chemistry of Materials that have been cited more than 1,000 times) for “Introduction to Organic Thin Film Transistors and Design of n-Channel Organic Semiconductors" published in 2004, along with Chris Newman, Demetrio da Silva Filho, Jean-Luc Brédas, Paul Ewbank, and Kent Mann.
December 13, 2021: Assistant Professor Jessica Lamb (Seed) was selected for the inaugural PROF Leadership Development Award. The ACS Leadership Development Institute is an invitation-only conference where leaders across the chemical enterprise come together to develop and hone their skills in leadership and management to empower their success as ACS Leadership.
December 9, 2021: Professor David Flannigan (Seed) and recent Ph.D. graduate Yichao Zhang have co-authored a paper detailing the discovery of a new way to easily manipulate and control the properties of two-dimensional sheets of an important class of semiconducting materials that could be used to design next-generation electronic devices. Other MRSEC researchers involved in this project include Professor Ellad Tadmor (Seed) and Tadmor Group member graduate student Moon-ki Choi.
December 2, 2021: Yingying Zhang (Wang, X., IRG-1) won Best Student Poster at the Materials Research Society (MRS) fall meeting in Boston, MA.
November 15, 2021: Assistant Professor Ognjen Ilic (Seed) received the Air Force Young Investigator (YIP) award. The YIP award is awarded to scientists and engineers at United States research institutions who received a Ph.D. or equivalent degrees in the last seven years and show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research of military interests.
November 10, 2021: Eeshani Godbole, a 5th year chemical engineering PhD candidate advised by CEMS Assistant Professor David Poerschke (Seed) has won the Graduate Excellence in Materials Science (GEMS) Diamond Award from the Basic Science Division of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS).
November 3, 2021: In a ceremony delayed nearly a year due to COVID-19, Karen Lozano (IRG-2, UTRGV PREM) was officially inducted into the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) with the esteemed distinction of NAI Fellow status. The NAI Fellows Program "was established to highlight academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors."
November 2, 2021: Wyatt Curtis (fifth-year ChE graduate student) and Professor David Flannigan (Seed) are co-authors on a research paper that was recently published in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics (a Royal Society of Chemistry publication) as part of the themed issue "Developments in Ultrafast Spectroscopy." The invited paper has now been selected by the editors as a "2021 PCCP HOT Article"
October 1, 2021: Assistant Professor Boya Xiong (Seed) is investigating the antiviral properties of Moringa oleifera seeds and testing their potential for use as a home-made mask coating that could trap coronavirus and other pathogens.
September 27, 2021: Professor Theresa Reineke (IRG-2) received the 2022 American Chemical Society (ACS) Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award. The Arthur C. Cope Award is awarded for achievement in the field of organic chemistry research.
September 21, 2021: Bryan Cote, a 5th year chemical engineering PhD candidate advised by Associate Professor Vivian Ferry (IRG-2) and Professor Kevin Dorfman (IRG-2), won an award at the recent Minnesota chapter AVS Symposium. The award includes a cash certificate and free AVS membership. Bryan was runner-up for "Best Talk" winning $500. The theme of the symposium was “Vacuum - the Enabling Science and Technology".
June 17, 2021: Associate Professor Vivian Ferry (IRG-2) is among seven new Fellows of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment (IonE). Fellows are established in their careers, having demonstrated excellence in one or more subject areas related to the environment and sustainability.
May 26, 2021: Regents Professor Timothy Lodge (IRG-2) has been named the inaugural Prager Chair in Macromolecular Science in Chemistry. The chair is the first of two established by the late College of Science and Engineering Professor Emeritus Stephen Prager and the late Dr. Julie Prager.
May 6, 2021: Associate Professor Bharat Jalan (IRG-1) has won the prestigious Peter Mark Memorial Award from the American Vacuum Society (AVS). The international award is given each year to one young scientist to honor their outstanding theoretical or experimental work. Bharat is recognized for his contributions to the field of molecular beam epitaxy.
March 17, 2021: Assistant Professor Turan Birol (IRG-1, Seed) is among ten recipients of the 2021-2023 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. This University-wide program seeks to advance the careers of the most promising junior faculty members who have potential to make significant contributions to their departments and scholarly fields.
March 9, 2021: Michelle Calabrese (IRG-2, Seed) is one of the recipients of the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award. This award recognizes faculty for outstanding research and leadership and is intended to help young faculty achieve tenure. Recipients of this award are nominated by 3M researchers and selected for their outstanding research, experience and academic leadership.
February 10, 2021: Turan Birol (IRG-1, Seed) has been selected for a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
February 4, 2021: Ognjen Ilic (Seed) is one of the recipients of the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award. This award recognizes faculty for outstanding research and leadership and is intended to help young faculty achieve tenure.
January 17, 2021: A research team led by Andre Mkhoyan (IRG-1) and including Turan Birol (IRG-1, Seed) and Bharat Jalan (IRG-1) has made a discovery that blends the best of two sought-after qualities for touchscreens and smart windows—transparency and conductivity. The researchers are the first to observe metallic lines in a perovskite crystal. The finding was made using advanced transmission electron microscopy (TEM), a technique that can form images with magnifications of up to 10 million.
January 11, 2021: A team including MRSEC researchers Bharat Jalan (IRG-1) and Andre Mkhoyan (IRG-1) has discovered a groundbreaking one-step process for creating materials with unique properties, called metamaterials. Their results show the realistic possibility of designing similar self-assembled structures with the potential of creating “built-to-order” nanostructures for wide application in electronics and optical devices.
December 18, 2020: Chris Leighton's (IRG-1) research advancements involving iron pyrite (fool’s gold) are featured in the December 2020 print issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.
December 15, 2020: Theresa Reineke's and Tim Lodge's (IRG-2) research is featured in Chemical & Engineering News. The article titled 'Polycation Architecture and Assembly Direct Successful Gene Delivery: Micelleplexes Outperform Polyplexes via Optimal DNA Packaging' was originally published in 2019.
December 4, 2020: MRSEC American Indian Fellow Onri Benally, a research associate in the College of Science and Engineering’s Nano Magnetism and Quantum Spintronics Lab, was featured in CSE News.
October 20, 2020: Professors Steven Koester (IRG-1) and Vlad Pribiag (Seed) are the Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator of a five-year, $2 million grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create an international “network-of-networks” that seeks to accelerate the discovery and development of quantum information systems. The 'Global Quantum Leap' (GQL) network partnerships will bridge fundamental knowledge gaps between the nanomanufacturing and quantum information communities, including fundamental process, materials, and integration challenges.
September 29, 2020: Mahesh Mahanthappa (IRG-2) has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) upon the recommendation of the APS Division of Polymer Physics (DPOLY).
September 17, 2020: The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) has named J. Ilja Siepmann (IRG-2) editor-in-chief of the Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data.
September 1, 2020: MRSEC researchers Chris Ellison (IRG-2), Andre Mkhoyan (IRG-1), and Vivian Ferry (IRG-2) have earned promotions! Ellison and Mkhoyan have been promoted to the rank of professor and Ferry has been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure.
August 31, 2020: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $18,000,000 in renewed funding to the University of Minnesota Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (UMN MRSEC) through 2026. The UMN MRSEC program is among 11 Centers nationwide receiving funding for successful collaborative research. This is the fourth renewal of the Minnesota MRSEC since its inception in 1998, with cumulative total funding exceeding $79 million from NSF.
July 29, 2020: A team of MRSEC IRG-1 researchers led by Chris Leighton, Turan Birol, Rafael Fernandes, working with Augsburg University, has achieved an important breakthrough in magnetoionics. The concept in this emerging field is to direct the motion of ions at interfaces to control magnets in an ultra-energy-efficient manner, using voltage, but little current. This is of high interest for next-generation memory devices. Prior work established that ferromagnetism can be electrically induced and controlled in various types of magnetic materials, but never in an initially nonmagnetic material. Exactly this was achieved here by using ionic liquid gating to voltage induce ferromagnetism in diamagnetic iron disulfide (Fool’s Gold), demonstrating that useful magnetic states can be induced in even nonmagnetic materials, with broad implications.
July 6, 2020: Congratulations to Xiaojia "XJ" Wang (IRG-2, Seed) on being promoted to associate professor with tenure!
May 21, 2020: Jiayi He has been awarded an Eastern Analytical Symposium Graduate Student Research Award, honored for her outstanding talent for scientific research. She is a fifth-year graduate student working with Professor Christy Haynes (IRG-2). Her research involves developing a polymer-modified electrolyte-gated transistor platform for soybean agglutinin detection. This platform, a combination of printed electronics, polymer affinity agents, and microfluidics shows great promise in future food safety applications. The other project Jiayi is working on is to see antimalaria drugs' impact on the chemical messenger secretion by blood platelets through single-cell electrochemistry.
May 7, 2020: Yichao Zhang (Seed), a fourth-year MSE graduate student in the Flannigan group, has been selected to receive the Louise T. Dosdall Fellowship from the UMN Graduate School for academic year 2020-21.
May 7, 2020: This article is about why relying on shared facilities can be more beneficial in the long term: to individual investigators, to universities, and to the research community at large. The opinions, examples, and best practices provided in this article were gleaned from participants who met in March 2018 under the umbrella of a US National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored Shared Facilities Operations Workshop. The workshop participants included faculty and facilities managers from Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSECs), Materials Innovation Platform (MIP), and National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) facilities from across the United States. While data management was discussed at length during these meetings and is a central concern for shared facilities, it is not discussed in this article to keep the scope manageable.
April 24, 2020: Professor Lee Penn has received the 2020 George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Service, honored for their outstanding service to the University, scientific community, and profession. Penn has a lengthy record of service at many levels, but what stands out is their exceptional, passionate leadership and service to diversity, equity, and access. They served as the founding chair of the Department of Chemistry's Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which was formed in 2013. Under their leadership, this committee has become transformative to every aspect of the department, from undergraduate course design to overall department climate and hiring.
April 22, 2020: Logan Karls (undergraduate IRG-3) has received the President’s Student Leadership & Service Award (PSLSA) for his accomplishments and contributions as an outstanding student leader at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. The award is presented to students for their exceptional leadership and service to the University of Minnesota and the surrounding community.
April 22, 2020: Assistant Professors Turan Birol (IRG-3) and David Poerschke (Seed) are among the recipients of prestigious research grants from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP). Within the group of ONR’s 2020 Young Investigators, twenty-six recipients will share $14 million in funding to conduct challenging scientific research that will benefit the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.
April 22, 2020: MRSEC Investigator Kevin Dorfman (IRG-3) was awarded the 2020 Distinguished McKnight University Professorship, an award given to outstanding faculty members who have recently achieved full professor status.
February 27, 2020: Regents Professor Timothy Lodge (IRG-3) has received the 2020 Sustained Research Prize of the Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA). He is being honored for his pivotal contributions to the fundamental understanding of polymer structure, thermodynamics, and dynamics through the use of small angle neutron scattering.
February 26, 2020: Over the course of a 19-year career at the University of Minnesota, Distinguished McKnight University Professor Chris Leighton (IRG-1) has matched world-renowned research with extraordinary commitment to teaching and education-related service. His accomplishments encompass outstanding classroom instruction, extensive curriculum development, exceptional program development during an eight-year tenure as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Materials Science and Engineering, unwavering commitment to excellence in advising and mentoring, and an outstanding record of involvement of undergraduate students in research.
February 24, 2020: Professor Mahesh Mahanthappa (Seed) has been elected to serve as Vice Chair of the American Physical Society Division of Polymer Physics (APS DPOLY). His election kicks off a four year commitment; he will serve as Vice Chair in 2020, Chair-Elect in 2021, Chair in 2022, and Past Chair in 2023.
February 21, 2020: Professor Chris Leighton (IRG-1) was recently announced as one of the 2020 Fellows of the Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA). The NSSA is the central organization advancing neutron scattering in the US, and has been recognizing Fellows since 2007. Leighton was recognized for "his insightful application of neutron scattering to advance the understanding of magnetic materials, including magnetically inhomogeneous systems, complex oxides, and magnetic heterostructures."
February 12, 2020: Catherine Clark (iSuperSEED), a fifth-year MSE Ph.D. candidate advised by Professor Russell Holmes, has been selected as a recipient of the University of Minnesota Outstanding Community Service Award – Student, the highest honor the University of Minnesota gives to an undergraduate or graduate student who has made an extraordinary, significant, and demonstrated contribution to the betterment of society through academic studies and/or public service.
February 5, 2020: Professor Mahesh Mahanthappa (Seed) has been selected to receive the 2020 Laboratory Safety Institute Graduate Research Faculty Safety Award, awarded by the ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety to recognize graduate-level academic research faculty who demonstrate outstanding commitment to chemical health and safety in their laboratories.
January 2, 2020: Having a clearer understanding of what’s happening at the microscopic scale in its diesel fuel water filters could help the Donaldson Company further improve its filter design. The project Sungyon Lee (Seed) is now leading—to figure out exactly what’s happening within the filter—is the latest in a series of research collaborations between Donaldson Company and the U.
January 2, 2020: Assistant Professor David Poerschke (Seed) has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his research to on "Oxygen Transport in Heterogeneous, Nonoxide Ceramics - Toward Durable New Composite Constituents." This prestigious award provides support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.
December 16, 2019: Lorraine Francis (IRG-2), a Distinguished University Teaching Professor, and Dan Frisbie (IRG-1), Distinguished McKnight University Professor and CEMS Department Head, will have their breakthrough printed electronics technology licensed by Carpe Diem Technologies, Inc. The technology is called SCALE (Self-aligned Capillarity-Assisted Lithography for Electronics), and is particularly suitable for printing on flexible substrates, such as paper and plastic.
November 22, 2019: Professor Russell Holmes has been appointed as the Ronald L. and Janet A. Christenson Chair in Renewable Energy for a five year term. As the Christenson Chair, Holmes will receive an annual stipend to support his scholarly activities in the research and education of renewable energy. Professor Uwe Kortshagen, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, also holds a Christenson Chair, having been appointed last year.
November 18, 2019: Assistant Professor Vivian Ferry (Seed) is one of two recipients of the 2020 recipients of the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award - Academic focus - in recognition of her contributions to the understanding of light-matter interactions in solar energy conversion, and the development of optical materials for plasmonics, metamaterials, and nanocrystals. The SPIE Early Career Achievement Award is presented in recognition of significant and innovative technical contributions in the engineering or scientific fields of relevance to SPIE. This award recognizes excellence in academia.
November 9, 2019: Associate Professor Xiang Cheng (Seed) was recently awarded the 2019 Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award, consisting of a plaque and honorarium, at the 91st Society of Rheology Annual Meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina. The competitive award is given to a young person who has distinguished him/herself in rheological research, rheological practice, or service to rheology. Cheng was recognized for his innovative use of imaging and deep physical insight to unravel rheology of soft matter; and for coupling rheological measurements with state-of-the-art imaging techniques including high-speed photography, fast confocal microscopy and digital inline holography to investigate the rheology of active fluids and jammed soft materials and the impact of liquid drops.
October 21, 2019: Professor Christy Haynes (IRG-2) has been named to The Analytical Scientist Power List 2019—a list of the top analytical researchers across the globe. In her profile Haynes said that an exciting recent advance is her group’s first nanomaterial design project for agricultural applications is coming to fruition. They have been designing nanoparticles to controllably transform and release nutrients that promote healthy crop growth following uptake by a plant.
September 6, 2019: MRSEC welcomes new assistant professor Michelle Calabrese (Seed)! Calabrese earned her Ph.D. in chemical & biomolecular engineering from the University of Delaware. She completed a two-year appointment as a postdoctoral researcher in chemical engineering at MIT prior to joining the department.
September 4, 2019: Congratulations to Catherine Clark (iSuperSEED) and Athena Metaxas (IRG-2), who received Outstanding Teaching Assistant (TA) Awards for their efforts during the 2018-2019 academic year. Award recipients received a cash prize and t-shirt.
August 26, 2019: Professor Laura Gagliardi (Seed) has received the American Chemical Society's 2020 Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry. She is honored for her leadership in developing and applying quantum mechanical electronic structure methods to multi-configurational problems in bonding, catalysis, and inorganometallic chemistry.
July 30, 2019: Associate Professor Bharat Jalan (IRG-1, Seed) is among the recipients of the 2019 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology. Jalan was honored on Thursday, July 25 at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. has been named a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology.
July 22, 2019: Professor Laura Gagliardi (Seed) has been elected as a member to the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS). The IAQMS is an international scientific society, covering applications of quantum theory, including chemistry and chemical physics. IAQMS members are chosen because of their distinguished scientific work, and their leadership in the application of quantum mechanics to the study of molecules and macromolecules.
July 3, 2019: Associate Professor Bharat Jalan (IRG-1, Seed) has been named a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology.
July 2, 2019: Associate Professor K. Andre Mkhoyan (IRG-2) has been awarded a grant through the Research Infrastructure Investment Program to undertake a large electron microscopy upgrade to the College of Science and Engineering (CSE) Characterization Facility (CharFac). With this award, a new generation, analytical, high-resolution scanning and transmission electron microscope (HR-(S)TEM) will be installed in the CharFac. The HR-(S)TEM is an essential instrument that will allow many principal investigators, research scientists, graduate students, postdoctoral associates, and some undergraduates to characterize their samples at sub-nanometer-scale. This single analytical HR-(S)TEM will replace two aging TEMs in the CharFac.
Summer, 2019: 2017 Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) participants Onri Benally and Cedric Mannie were recently featured in the summer issue of Winds of Change. Winds of Change is published by the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) "with a single-minded focus on career and educational advancement for American Indians/Alaska Natives/Native Hawaiians/First Nations, with an emphasis on STEM."
June 24, 2019: Congratulations to Assistant Professor Xiaojia Wang (IRG-2, Seed), recipient of the 2019 Minnesota Futures Award for her project titled Ultra-Efficient Wide-Bandgap Power Converters: Material, Device, Circuit, and System-level Challenges and Opportunities. The Minnesota Futures Grant Program is offered annually by the Office of the Vice President for Research to promote research that incorporates new, cross-disciplinary ideas.
May 30, 2019: Professor J. Ilja Siepmann (IRG-3) has been named Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), which is the highest grade of membership and achieved only through election by the Board of Directors. Candidates for AIChE Fellow are nominated by their peers and must have significant chemical engineering experience (generally 25 years), must have demonstrated significant service to the profession, and must have been a member of AIChE for at least 10 years.
April 29, 2019: Professor Lorraine Francis (IRG-2) has been named a College of Science and Engineering (CSE) Distinguished Professor for her exceptional contributions to teaching, international reputation in scholarly research, and genuine commitment to the College and its activities.
April 22, 2019: Associate Professor Xiang Cheng (SEED) has been named the 2019 Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award recipient. The competitive award is given to a young person who has distinguished him/herself in rheological research, rheological practice, or service to rheology.
March 8, 2019: MRSEC Seed Investigator Sang-Hyun Oh (Seed) was awarded the 2019 Distinguished McKnight University Professorship, an award given to outstanding faculty members who have recently achieved full professor status.
March 8, 2019: MRSEC Investigator Christy Haynes (IRG-2) was awarded the 2019 Distinguished McKnight University Professorship, an award given to outstanding faculty members who have recently achieved full professor status.
February, 2019: Vlad Pribiag (Seed) is among ten recipients of the 2019-2021 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. This University-wide program seeks to advance the careers of the most promising assistant professors at a crucial point in their professinal lives. Recipients were chosen based on merit, professional promise, quality of publication record, and originality and innovation in research achievements.
January 31, 2019: The inaugural All-MRSEC Meeting was held on January 31, 2019 and featured talks from Fiona Burnell (SEED), Bharat Jalan (IRG-1), Andre Mkhoyan (IRG-2), Nathan Mara (SEED), Ilja Siepmann (IRG-3), Andreas Stein (SEED), and Ellad Tadmor (SEED).
January, 2019: Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Cari Dutcher (IRG-3) has received the George W. Taylor Career Development Award. This award recognizes exceptional contributions to teaching by a candidate for tenure during the probationary period.
December 7, 2018: Professors Vlad Pribiag (SEED) and Paul Crowell from the School of Physics and Astronomy are part of a group that will receive a $2.25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop materials and device knowledge for creating quantum computing.
November 15, 2018: Professor Theresa Reineke (IRG-3 Coordinator) is a Fellow in the Big Ten Academic Alliance Academic Leadership Program (ALP) for 2018-19. Established in 1989, this intensive experience develops the leadership and managerial skills of faculty who have demonstrated exceptional ability and academic promise.
November, 2018: Yingying Zhang, advised by (IRG-2) Professor Xiaojia "XJ" Wang, won the travel grant (highest cash award) for attending the Micro/Nano Forum at the ASME 2018 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE 2018) in Pittsburgh, PA. She presented her work on Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Thermal Interfaces and Experimental Study of Thermal Transport in ZnO-based Nanocomposite Systems. Congratulations Yingying!
December, 2018: Intersociety Polymer Education Council (IPEC) provides this award to high school science teachers for excellence in polymer education. The national award winner receives up to $750 reimbursed to attend a NSTA / ACS or other educational related conference, a check for $1000 and a plaque stating their accomplishments. Congratulations Cassie!
Dec. 11, 2018: The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) announced that Regents Professor Frank S. Bates (IRG-3), has been named an NAI Fellow. Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.
November, 2018: PhD Student Kriti Agarwal (MRSEC Seed ECE) received a Best Poster Award at the MRSEC 2018 Fall Meeting in Boston, MA. Her poster is titled “Geometrical Modification of Hybridized Plasmon Modes in 3D Graphene Nanostructures.” The Best Poster Award was given to 20 posters out of 2,640 posters over the course of the 5-day meeting! Kriti is advised by Assistant Professor Jeong-Hyun Cho (MRSEC Seed ECE).
November, 2018: PhD Student Chunhui Dai (MRSEC Seed ECE) received the 1st Place prize for the best poster at the 2018 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE), in Pittsburgh, PA. Chunhui's poster was chosen as best from more than 100 posters presented at the Exposition. His poster is titled “In-Situ Monitored Self-Assembly of 3D Graphene-based Nanostructures.” Chunhui is advised by Assistant Professor Jeong-Hyun Cho (MRSEC Seed ECE).
November, 2018: Associate Professor Chris Ellison (MRSEC Seed CEMS) was awarded co-PI on a new National Science Foundation EFRI grant entitled "EFRI C3 SoRo: Strong Soft Robots-Multiscale Burrowing and Inverse Design." The team will study how soft robots of different sizes tunnel through materials. These discoveries may provide access where access wasn’t possible, such as inoperable brain tumors, or buried pipes. The awarded team: PI Tim Kowalewski (ME) and co-PIs James Van de Ven (ME), Emmanuel Detournay (CEGE), Chris Ellison (CEMS), and Kota (U Micheigan).
October 26, 2018: Assistant Professor Vivian Ferry (MRSEC Seed CEMS) is one of five women awarded the 2019 Marion Milligan Mason Award by the American Association For The Advancement Of Science (AAAS). Ferry was awarded for her extraordinary contribution in her research program and her commitment to move the field forward. Her research focuses on light-matter interactions in nanoscale materials, and her specific research interests include light management in solar energy conversion, switchable metamaterials, and nanoscale chirality.
October, 2018: Professor Theresa Reineke (MRSEC IRG-3 Chem) has received the 2018 DuPont Nutrition & Health Science Excellence Medal from the Danisco Foundation for her achievements in advancing science and technology relevant to the future of food, nutrition, and health.
October 24, 2018: Assistant Professor Vivian Ferry (MRSEC Seed CEMS) has been awarded the 2018 Stanford R. Ovshinsky Sustainable Energy Fellowship by the American Physical Society (APS), for her research on developing improved photovoltaic systems using spectrally-selective photonic structures.
October, 2018: Professor Theresa Reineke (MRSEC IRG-3 Chem) is featured in Bioconjugate Chemistry's "Women in Bioconjugate Chemistry: Celebrating Women Scientists" virtual issue. This issue celebrates women in science.
September, 2018: Professor Uwe Kortshagen (MRSEC IRG-2 Mechanical Engineering), is being honored "for contributions to our fundamental understanding of non-linear electron transport and plasma-nanoparticle interactions in low temperature plasmas and the development of plasma based synthesis of nanoparticles." The number of APS Fellows elected each year is limited to no more than 1/2 of 1% of the membership! Congratulations!
September 12, 2018: Professor Boris Shklovskii (MRSEC IRG-2 Physics), has been awarded the 2019 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize. The APS Buckley Condensed Matter Award recognizes his "pioneering research in the physics of disordered materials and hopping conductivity." Congratulations!
July 18, 2018: MRSEC PhD students Jacob Held (IRG-2),Biqiong Yu (IRG-1), and Tao Zhang (iSuperSEED) are among the 2018-2019 Doctoral Dissertation Fellows. The Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (DDF) gives the University's most accomplished PhD candidates an opportunity to devote full-time effort to an outstanding research project by providing time to finalize and write a dissertation during the fellowship year. Congratulations!
July 17, 2018: Professor Jane Wissinger hosted a workshop for high school science teachers focused on green and sustainable chemistry curriculum for their classrooms. Twenty-one teachers from across the state of Minnesota (as far as Morris and Moose Lake as well as local) participated in the multi-day workshop, July 17-19. In both classroom and laboratory learning experiences, the teachers learned about the principles of green chemistry, sustainability goals, and their application in addressing human health and the environment.
The Center for Sustainable Polymers (CSP), in partnership with the Minnesota Corn Growers Association and the University’s Materials Research Science & Engineering Center (MRSEC) offered this free workshop. Wissinger is a CSP investigator and is a leading expert in green chemistry. Her co-hosts were Cassandra Knutson from White Bear Lake High School, and Cassidy Javner from Shakopee High School. Both Knutson and Javner are associated with the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center's (MRSEC) Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program.
July, 8, 2018: Recent work at the University of Minnesota, supported by the UMN MRSEC, The National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Argonne National Lab has combined X-ray and neutron scattering to probe elusive operating mechanisms in a new class of devices known as electrolyte transistors.
June 17, 2018: Assistant Professor David J. Flannigan (Seed) has been selected to receive the Sigma Xi 2018 Young Investigator Award for his outstanding contributions as a researcher in the early stage of his career and exemplifying the ideals of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society. The award includes an honorarium of $5,000, a commemorative certificate, and the opportunity to present the Young Investigator Award Lecture at the Society’s Annual Meeting on October 25-28, 2018 in San Francisco, California.
June 8, 2018: Spencer Reisbick (Seed) has received a Microscopy & Microanalysis (M&M) Student Scholar Award. He is a third-year chemical physics graduate student who is advised by David Flannigan from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. Under Flannigan's tutelage, Spencer works on the structural localization of charge density waves in 1T-TaS2. Papers from more than 175 applicants were reviewed, from which only 30 were selected for M&M Student Scholar Awards. The award is sponsored by the Microanalysis Society and includes complimentary registration for the full M&M 2018 meeting and financial support of $1,000 to help defray costs of attending the meeting held in Baltimore, in August 2018.
Spencer is the laboratory safety officer for Flannigan's research group, and is Education and Resources Chair for the Joint Safety Team.
May 15, 2018: Professor Martin Greven (IRG-1) has been named a 2018 fellow of the Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA). The Fellowship recognizes members who have made significant contributions to the neutron scattering community in North America. Greven was cited for "world-class efforts in the growth and neutron scattering study of bulk oxides, especially for his influential work on cuprate high-Tc superconductors."
May 8, 2018: Professor Christy L. Haynes (IRG-2) has received the 2018 Theophilus Redwood Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry. This award honors leading analytical scientists who are outstanding communicators. Haynes is the first female chemist to receive this award.
Haynes is an internationally recognized leader within the scientific community, and is one of the nation’s most talented analytical chemists. Her training combines laser spectroscopy and nanomaterials characterization with electrochemistry and immunology. She has built a unique research program that addresses questions at the interface of immunology, toxicology, materials science, and chemistry.
Her research group focuses on applications of analytical chemistry in the fields of immunology and toxicology, with much expertise in the area of single cell analysis. Another major focus encompasses studying fundamental properties of cells involved in inflammation. Her group has performed the first ever real-time single blood platelet measurements, examining the chemical messenger molecules that platelets secrete upon stimulation. While most of the Haynes lab research employs electrochemical and spectroscopic techniques, the group is always exploring new and exciting technologies to answer pressing bioanalytical questions.
May 4, 2018: Regents Professor Frank S. Bates (IRG-3) was inducted into the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) during the National Academy of Sciences 155th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, April 28, 2018. Bates was among only 84 researchers nationwide to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017.
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Watch Bates' induction into National Academy of Sciences
April 27, 2018: A research team led by Professor Bharat Jalan (IRG-1, Seed), including CEMS graduate students Abhinav Prakash and Tianqi Wang (Seed), has been recognized as a 2018 TechConnect Innovation Awardee for their technology, “Transparent Conducting Oxide Film – Indium Tin Oxide Alternative." The group will be honored at the TechConnect World Conference in Anaheim, California in May 2018. The TechConnect Innovation Awards selects the top early-stage innovations from around the world through an industry-review process of the top 20% of annually submitted technologies into the TechConnect World Conference. Rankings are based on the potential positive impact the submitted technology will have on a specific industry sector.
April 8, 2018: Professor Laura Gagliardi (iSuperSEED) has been honored with a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which will enable her to conduct research with scientists in Germany in 2019.
The award is named after the late Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables researchers from all over the world to spend time conducting research in Germany.
Gagliardi is one of the most highly accomplished theoretical and computational chemists in the world, internationally known for her contributions to the development of electronic structure methods and their use for understanding complex chemical system. Her work involves the prediction and modeling of chemical phenomena by means of advanced chemical computation.
April 5, 2018: Chemistry Professor Christy L. Haynes (IRG-2) has been awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the highly competitive, national fellowship is awarded annually to about 175 scholars and artists selected from nearly 3,000 applicants.
Professor Haynes is associate department head of the Department of Chemistry and the Elmore H. Northey Professor of Chemistry, and an associate editor of Analytical Chemistry.
March 31, 2018: Assistant Professor Xiaojia Wang (IRG-2, Seed) has been selected for the 2018 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award. This award is administered by 3M Research and Development in partnership with the Corporate Giving Program. It recognizes outstanding junior faculty and encourages the pursuit of new ideas among non-tenured professors, giving them the opportunity to interact with their peers and 3M scientists.
March 20, 2018: David Flannigan (Seed) has been selected as one of five recipients of the University of Minnesota's special mid-career faculty award, the McKnight Presidential Fellow Award. As an award recipient, Flannigan will hold the title of McKnight Presidential Fellow for three years and receive funding to support his research and scholarly activities.
February 22, 2018: Professor Theresa Reineke (IRG-3) has been honored as a 2018 POLY Fellow by the American Chemical Society Division of Polymer Chemistry, recognized for her scientific accomplishments and service to the profession. She will be honored at the POLY/PMSE Awards Ceremony, 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 21, at the ACS Spring National Meeting in New Orleans.
Reineke is internationally recognized for her transformative research contributions to the field of polymeric materials chemistry; leadership of innovative and collaborative research teams across the University of Minnesota campus; excellent track record of entrepreneurship and technology licensing; and service to societies and organizations in her research field.
February 14, 2018: The development of a new additive that helps meld incompatible types of plastic together, which holds important implications for recycling, has won the 2017 Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Association's oldest prize, supported by The Fodor Family Trust, annually recognizes the author(s) of an outstanding paper published in the Research Articles or Reports sections of the journal Science between June and the following May.
Due to their remarkable work, James Eagan and his colleagues at Cornell University, with contributions from Regents Professor Frank Bates (IRG-3), Professor Emeritus Chris Macosko, and CEMS graduate student Jun Xu, will receive the 2017 Newcomb Cleveland Prize. The research was originally published by Science on Feb. 24, 2017. The full list of researchers who contributed to the award-winning work and related Science paper "Combining polyethylene and polypropylene: Enhanced performance with PE/iPP multiblock polymers" include: James M. Eagan, Jun Xu, Rocco Di Girolamo, Christopher M. Thurber (Ph.D. ChE '15), Christopher W. Macosko, Anne M. LaPointe, Frank S. Bates, and Geoffrey W. Coates.
January 23, 2018: MRSEC Seed Investigator David Flannigan has been selected by the College of Science and Engineering (CSE) Promotion and Tenure Advisory Committee to receive the George Taylor Career Development Award.
January 3, 2018: MRSEC RET participants Cassandra Knutson and Cassidy Javner, along with their faculty mentor Jane Wissinger of the UMN Center for Sustainable Polymers, have been selected as recipients of an ACS-CEI Award for Incorporating Sustainability into Chemistry Education, sponsored by the ACS Committee on Environmental Improvement (CEI).
This award is an acknowledgement of the team's efforts to incorporate sustainability into the high school chemistry classroom through development of an annual three-day summer workshop for Minnesota high school chemistry teachers. The workshop includes a background and introduction to sustainability and green chemistry along with hands-on laboratory experiments that highlighted novel polymer experiments aligned with next generation science standards (NGSS). The 2017 workshop (June 20-22) was attended by 20 teachers.
The award will be presented at the 2018 ACS Spring Meeting in New Orleans (March 18-22) where Knutson, Javner, and Wissinger will present their work.
Applications for the 2018 RET Program and Teacher Workshop are now being accepted:
RET Program Description and Application
Workshop Registration
This workshop is sponsored by the University of Minnesota Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, and the Center for Sustainable Polymers.
November 17, 2017: MRSEC researcher Jeff Walter (with research partner Bryan Voigt) was named a finalist in the Dow Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge Award (SISCA) competition for their project titled, Pyrite FeS2: A Low-Cost Earth-Abundant Solar Solution for Sustainable Power. The Dow Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge Award (Dow SISCA) recognizes the work of graduate students with innovative ideas and research that encourages and promotes sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental problems.
Update: Walter named runner-up in final round and received a $2,500 prize.
November 14, 2017: Investigator Chris Leighton spoke as a Distinguised Lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York on his MRSEC and Center for Qunatum Materials (CQM) funded work.
November 14, 2017: Investigator Christy Haynes has been named an Institute on the Environment (IonE) Fellow for her distinguished intellectual contributions to creating a sustainable futures. Other MRSEC IonE fellows (named in previous years) include Eray Aydil, Laura Gagliardi, and Marc Hillmyer.
October 26, 2017: Investigator Cari Dutcher was awarded the 2017 Kenneth T. Whitby Award from the American Association for Aersol Research. This award recognizes Dutcher for her outstanding technical contributions to aerosol science and technology as a young scientist.
October 26, 2017: Investigator Christy Haynes is featured in The Analytical Scientist's 2017 Power List as one of the top 10 researchers in the category Giants of Nano: Microfluidics and nanoscale science.
October 5, 2017: Regents Professor Timothy Lodge has received the 2018 Paul J. Flory Polymer Education Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Polymer Chemistry, honored for his outstanding achievements in promoting undergraduate and graduate polymer education.
October 2, 2017: MRSEC researcher Dr. Laxman R. Thoutman received a runner-up award at the poster competition at the International Workshop on Oxide Electronics (IWOE 24). His work was titled, "The Role of Point Defects and Band Offsets on Quasi-2DEG at Complex Oxide Heterostructures".
September 15, 2017: Researcher Zachary Robinson (Kortshagen group) was one of only 52 students nationwide to receive the Department of Energy's 2017 Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program Award. Robinson will be conducting research in ultrafast materials and chemical sciences at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico for DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences program.
September 11, 2017: The TPT/PBS pilot season of "Hands on Science" will feature Physics Force and Energy and U. The episodes will appear on the TPT/PBS website and via Roku, Apple TV, and other streaming devices. Each episode will play on TPT 2 shortly after the premiere date.
Broadcast Premiere Dates:
October 15th, 7pm, Minnesota Channel: U of M Physics Force
October 22nd, 7pm, Minnesota Channel: U of M Energy and U
For more details, visit the Hands on Science website
September 11, 2017: Investigator Bharat Jalan is the 2017 winner of the Paul H. Holloway Young Investigator Award from the Thin Film Division of the American Vacuum Society.
September 1, 2017: The CEMS Fall 2017 Department Seminars series begins September 5. All seminars will be held in B-75 Amundson Hall from 1:25–2:20 pm. MRSEC investigator, David Flannigan, will be the series kick-off speaker.
August 30, 2017: Prof. Karen Wooley from Texas A&M University will be giving a seminar hosted by the POLY PMSE student chapter, "Functional polymer materials designed for advanced applications and sustainability". It will take place on Tuesday, September 12th at 9:45 AM in Smith 331.
August 28, 2017: The UMN Characterization Facility, a College of Science & Engineering core facility, recently acquired a state-of-the-art small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) instrument through generous contributions from the NSF-funded UMN Materials Research Science & Engineering Center and the UMN Center for Sustainable Polymers, the Industrial Partnership for Research in Interfacial and Materials Engineering (IPRIME), and the Office of the Dean of the College of Science & Engineering.
August 25, 2017: Former MRSEC student Nazila Haratipour has been invited to attend the Rising Stars 2017 workshop at Stanford University. Rising Stars is a career-building workshop for women electrical and computer engineers and computer scientists interested in careers in academia. The workshop brings together the best and brightest graduate and postdoc women in EE and CS for scientific discussions and informal sessions aimed at navigating the early stages of an academic career.
August 16, 2017: MRSEC investigator Uwe Kortshagen of IRG-2 serves as a Technical Advisor for a new start-up, Ensor, Inc.
August 15, 2017: MRSEC researcher Jacob Held (Mkhoyan Group) won a first place MSA Student Poster Award at the Microscopy & Microanalysis 2017 meeting for his poster, "Elemental Distribution Analysis of Core/Shell Nanocrystals with STEM/EDX."
August 10, 2017: MRSEC seed investigator David Flannigan was selected to receive a financial award as part of the 2017 Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Program.
August 3, 2017: The University of Minnesota MRSEC welcomes University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) colleagues for two days (August 8 & 9) to discuss collaborative efforts in both The Partnership for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) program and other MRSEC-based collaborations.
July 25, 2017: MRSEC investigators Theresa Reineke, Marc Hillmyer, and Tim Lodge were named by ACS in a list of highly prolific authors published as part of the celebration of ACS's one-millionth article publication.
As Editor-in-chief of the journal, Macromolecules, Director Tim Lodge is featured on the ACS Macromolecules page.
June 16, 2017: MRSEC member David Blank has been appointed the new Head of the Department of Chemistry, effective Sept. 1, 2017. The appointment was made by Samual B. Mukasa, Dean of the College of Science & Engineering. Blank succeeds Professor William Tolman who has served as the department’s chair for the past eight years.
June 15, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Bharat Jalan is awarded the American Association for Crystal Growth Young Scientist Award for his scientific excellence, clarity of presentation and impact on the field of crystal growth.
June 15, 2017: 2017 IPRIME poster awards were awarded to MRSEC researchers Sunipa Pramanik (Nanostructural Materials and Processes) and Tianqi Wang (Electronic Materials and Devices).
June 5, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Christy Haynes is a National Finalist for the 2017 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists.
May 26, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Rafael Fernandes has been named a McKnight Presidential Fellow.
May 10, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Bharat Jalan is featured in a news release from the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering titled, "Discovery of new transparent thin film material could improve electronics and solar cells."
May 10, 2017: MRSEC Seed Investigator Vlad Pribiag was awarded 1 of 2 International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Young Scientist Prize in Low Temperature Physics for “important contributions to two main areas of low temperature and nanoscale physics: superconductivity in the edge modes of two-dimensional topological insulators; spin-dependent quantum transport in one-dimensional semiconductors with strong spin-orbit coupling. His results have elucidated key aspects of the electronic properties of these novel materials, which are candidates for quantum and classical information processing”.
May 2, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Frank Bates was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his excellence in original scientific research.
April 3, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Chris Leighton has recently been appointed as inaugural Editor of the newest addition to the American Physical Society family of journals, Physical Review Materials.
March 29, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Marc Hillmyer was recognized by the University of Minnesota as one of four researchers awarded the Entrepreneurial Resaerch Award for his work in developing environment-friendly materials from renewable sources.
March 24, 2017: MRSEC Researcher Athena Metaxas was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
March 16, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Radael Fernandes was awarded the 2017 George W. Taylor Career Development Award.
March 15, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Beth Stadler is a recipient of the 2017 Taylor Award for Distinguished Service.
March 10, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Theresa Reineke was awarded the 2017 Distinguished McKnight University Professorship, an award given to outstanding mid-career faculty.
March 9, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Eray Aydil was awarded the University of Minnesota Award for Outstanding Contributions to Postbaccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education. This annual award recognizes faculty nominated by the colleges for excellence in education.
February 23, 2017: MRSEC Seed Investigator Vlad Pribiag was selected as one of the 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics for his work on electronic transport in low-dimensional materials.
February 20, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Uwe Kortshagen's group work was published in Nature Photonics with press coverage by the University of Minnesota.
Read the University of Minnesota article titled, "Dream of energy-collecting windows is one step closer to reality"
February 6, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Cari Dutcher received the University of Minnesota McKnight Land-grant Professorship for her work on "Understanding Atmospheric Aerosol Particles through Models, Mimics, and Microfluidics."
February 6, 2017: MRSEC Investigator Vivian Ferry received the University of Minnesota McKnight Land-grant Professorship for her work on "Creating New Optical Materials for Application in Photovoltaics and Optoelectronic Devices."
Read more about the McKnight Land-grant Professorship award and 2017 awardees.
January 13, 2017: MRSEC seed investigator, Michael McAlpine, was one of 102 scientists awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by President Obama. This award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government for early career scientists and engieers.
January 3, 2017: MRSEC seed investigator, Laura Gagliardi, received the Isaiah Shavitt Lectureship.
December 7, 2016: MRSEC researcher, Dayne Plemmons (Flannigan group) won the "Best Poster Award" at the 2016 Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting & Exhibit in Boston, Massachusetts.
November 30, 2016: On October 23 – 27, 2016, the University of Minnesota MRSEC provided travel support for a team of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) undergraduate students to attend the the Materials Science & Technology 2016 meeting (MS&T16) in Salt Lake City, Utah. The team of students from the University of Minnesota won 3rd place in the Ceramic Mug Drop competition.
November 29, 2016: CEMS features a piece on the Community of Chemistry Graduate students, a group dedicated to improving mental, physical, and social health of graduate students. MRSEC reseacher, Amanda Maxwell, is a member of the CCGS team.
November 28, 2016: MRSEC investigator, Eray Aydil, is featured on Nanovation.
November 28, 2016: MRSEC investigator, Steven Koester, has been named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow.
November 17, 2016: MRSEC investigator, David Flannigan, was awarded the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation for his work on "Defect-modulated energy transport in semiconducting materials".
November 10, 2016: MRSEC Researcher, Nancy Trejo (Aydil group), won the Arvind Varma Graduate Travel Award to support her travel to the upcoming AIChE annual meeting in San Francisco, CA.
October 25, 2016: Investigator Frank Bates gave the H.C. Ørsted Lecture at Technical University of Denmark on October 13. His lecture was titled, "Sphericity and Symmetry Breaking in the Formation of Quasicrystals and Frank Kasper Phases in Block Polymer Melts."
October 20, 2016: A team of researchers, including MRSEC Investigators Rafael Fernandes, Martin Greven, Bharat Jalan, and Chris Leighton were awarded $2.6 million over the next 3 years from the Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences to start the Center for Quantum Materials.
October 19, 2016: Investigator Christy Haynes is featured in The Analytical Scientist's 2016 Power List as one of the top 50 women in analytical science.
October 17, 2016: MRSEC Researcher, Nancy Trejo (Aydil group), won the Minnesota AVS Fall Symposium best poster award for research on the syntehsis, morphology, structure, and optical properties of SnS Nanoplates.
October 11, 2016: MRSEC Researcher, Karl Schliep (Flannigan group), is one of seven scientists chosen for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Research Council (NRC) Postdoctoral Research Associate Program.
October 11, 2016: Seed Investigator Laura Gagliardi "has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, honored for her seminal contributions to the development of electronic-structure methods and their application to the understanding of complex chemical systems, including the prediction of new materials and associated properties."
September 26, 2016: New MRSEC seed awardee, Michael McAlpine, received media attention for his earlier 3-D printing innovations. We look forward to working with you, Michael! See the list of features below:
Plastics Today: The future of medical 3D printing: Devices with custom geometries and functionalities
3D MedNet podcast: 3D printing functional materials & devices: an interview with Michael McAlpine
QMED: Is This 3D Printing’s Future?
ASME: A 3D Approach to Nerve Damage
September 21, 2016: Seed Investigator Mo Li received the Institute for Engineering in Medicine Faculty Development Award for his research on developing a wearable spectroscopic sensin system for physiological monitoring.
September 16, 2016: Investigator Bharat Jalan received his 2016 Young Investigator MBE Award at the 19th International Conference on Molecular Bean Epitaxy in Montpellier, France.
September 13, 2016: Investigator Lorraine Francis was named the 3M Chair in Experiential Learning by the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering.
September 7-10, 2016: Investigators Chris Leighton and Dan Frisbie were local organizers for the FET2016 workshop — an international outreach event where attendees heard from 20 invited speakers from across the US, Europe, and Asia on the latest advances in field-effect control of materials.
September 8, 2016: Investigator Theresa Reineke was awarded the ACS Carl S. Marvel Creative Polymer Chemistry Award
August 23, 2016: Investigator Vivian Ferry was named to the MIT Technology Review 2016 Innovators Under 35 list. Look for Ferry in the September/October print magazine!
August 22, 2016: Mkhoyan group member, Jacob Held, was awarded a student poster award at the Microscopy & Microanalysis 2016 meeting.
August 22, 2016: Seed investigator Xiang Cheng received a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award for his reseach on "Studying the emergent collective flows of active fluids using engineered bacterial strains."
August 18, 2016: Director Tim Lodge and investigator Marc Hillmyer were quoted in a Nature news feature on polymer science titled, "The plastics revolution: how chemists are pushing polymers to new limits."
August 16, 2016: Professor Bharat Jalan has been awarded a 2016 Young Investigator MBE Award. This award recognizes Jalan for his "excellence and international leadership in use of metal-organic molecular beam epitaxy to synthesize and understand complex oxide heterostructures in pursuit of new electronic materials." — Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
August 1, 2016: Professor Theresa Reineke has been awarded a 2016 Sara Evans Faculty Woman Scholar/Leader Award. "This award recognizes women faculty at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities who have achieved significant national and international accomplishments and honors and who contribute as leaders on campus." — Department of Chemistry
July 24, 2016: Seed Investigator Laura Gagliardi has been named associate editor for the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation for her expertise in quantum mechanics, inogranic, nanoscience, and materials science.
May 26, 2016: Professor David Flannigan's group research published in the article, "Discrete Chromatic Aberrations Arising from Photoinduced Electron-Photon Interactions in Ultrafast Electron Microscopy" was featured on the cover of J. Phys. Chem. A.
Professor David Blank has been awarded the 2016 President's Award for Outstanding Service. In announcing the award, University of Minnesota President Eric Kaler wrote, “Your excellence is a model for your colleagues and co-workers to emulate. True to the mission of this great land-grant institution, you have done more than your share to make the University of Minnesota one of the preeminent institutions in the nation."
Theresa Reineke was awarded the 2016 George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Research from the University of Minnesota College of Science & Engineering.
Tim Lodge, MRSEC Director, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
"Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the country’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, convening leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to respond to the challenges facing the nation and the world. Current Academy research focuses on higher education, the humanities, and the arts; science and technology policy; global security and energy; and American institutions and the public good. The Academy’s work is advanced by its elected members, who are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs from around the world.” -AAAS.
Flannigan group research, titled Femtosecond electron imaging of defect-modulated phonon dynamics, was published in Nature Communications.
Tim Lodge (director) is named a 2016 Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA) Fellow “for the creative use of SANS to achieve groundbreaking insights into the structure and dynamics of a wide range of complex polymer systems, in particular, multi-block copolymers in the bulk and in selective solvents” —NSAA.
Russell J. Holmes (seed faculty) is named a recipient of the 2016 Horace T. Morse–University of Minnesota Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education.
Rafael Fernandes (IRG-1) is named a 2016 Cottrell Scholar. The Cottrell Scholar program recognizes promising early career teacher-scholars of chemistry, physics, and astronomy.
Frank S. Bates is the winner of the Ralph S. Graph Foundation 2016 Chemistry of Thermoplastic Elastomers Award. The award recognizes researchers for significant contributions to the advancement of chemistry of thermoplastic elastomers. Bates will receive the award at the Rubber Division, ACS 189th Technical Meeting and Education Symposium occurring April 18-21, 2016 in San Antonio, Texas.
David Flannigan is named as 2015 Beckman Young Investigator for his research "Unraveling Charge/Orbital Ordering, Magnesium and Lattice Dynamics with Ultrafast Electron Microscopy" and will receive a $750,000 grant to support his research. Flannigan is the first CEMS faculty member to receive this award.
Xiang Cheng is awarded the 2015 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering for his research on the physics of soft materials. The Packard Fellowship is awarded to 18 of the the nation's top innovative early-career scientists and engineers.
Theresa Reineke will be inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows. She was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows for her outstanding and creative contributions to the design and discovery of synthetic polymers for drug and gene delivery.
Xiang Cheng (Seed Faculty) has been named a 2016-2018 McKnight Land-Grant Professor for his research on engineering novel soft materials with controllable flow properties.
Yaming Jiang, a 3rd year chemical engineering graduate student co-advised by Professor Timothy Lodge and Professor Theresa Reineke, has been named a recipient of the Louise T. Dosdall fellowship for 2016-2017 academic year.
The Louise T. Dosdall fellowship recognizes women graduate students who show exceptional promise for a successful career in research in the natural or physical sciences and engineering where women are underrepresented. The awardees are selected each year for their strength of the academic record as well as the cohesiveness and significance of the research plan. Under this one year fellowship, Jiang will continue her studies on DNA-cationic micelle complexation for potential applications in drug delivery.
Martin Greven (IRG-1) has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election recognizes scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.
IRG-3 research in the Hillmyer group on Nano-scale patterning of metal oxides is featured in MRS Bulletin.
Eray Aydil (IRG-2) was a featured plenary speaker at the 2015 Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE) Network-Wide Meeting on June 3, 2015 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Aydil served on a panel of nanotechnology experts and presented on the future of nanoscience.
MRSEC Director Tim Lodge has been chosen to receive the 2015 Herman F. Mark Polymer Chemistry Award from the Polymer Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS). He is being honored for his outstanding research and leadership in polymer science. He will receive this award at the Boston ACS National Meeting in August.
Frank S. Bates, Chris Leighton, and Sangwoo Lee, a former post-doctoral fellow and doctoral student, have been awarded a 2014 Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Marc Hillmyer (IRG-3) has been awarded a prestigious McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair by University President Eric Kaler. This is one of the University's highest faculty awards. Professor Hillmyer is only the second professor in the University's College of Science and Engineering to receive the honor.
Using one of the largest supercomputers in the world, a team of researchers, including Professor Ilja Siepmann (IRG-3), Professor Michael Tsapatsis, graduate students Peng Bai and Mi Young Jeon, and postdoctoral researcher Limin Ren, has identified potential materials that could improve the production of ethanol and petroleum products. The discovery could lead to major efficiencies and cost savings in these industries.
"Next generation technological applications of solid state physics, incorporating superconductivity and magnetism, will require a deeper understanding of the cooperative interactions between electrons in solids. In these challenging systems, termed quantum materials, the collective behavior of the electrons cannot be derived from the properties of a single electron. Fernandes' research combines theoretical models and close collaboration with experimental groups to unravel the relationship between the microscopic behavior of these materials and their alluring macroscopic properties." – quote from McKnight Land-grant Recipients page.
Allen Goldman receives 2015 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize. The Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize was endowed in 1952 by AT&T Bell Laboratories to recognize outstanding work in condensed matter physics. Awarded annually, the prize consists of $20,000 and a certificate citing the contributions made by the recipient or recipients. Goldman shares the 2015 prize with Arthur Hebard, University of Florida; Aharon Kapitulnik, Stanford University and Matthew Fisher, University of California, Santa Barbara.
The Gore Annex- a 40,000 Sqaure-foot expansion of Amundson Hall had its official Grand opening on Nov. 7, 2014. The new space houses expanded lab space for the department of Chemical Engineering and Materials science including new undergraduate teaching labs and the world's first FEI Tecnai™ Femto ultrafast electron microscope (UEM) lab. The renovation was funded in part by a $10 million gift from Robert and Jane Gore. Robert Gore received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University in 1963 and is the inventor of GORE-TEX®. The Dow Chemical Company donated $5 million toward the project. Valspar donated $1 million to equip a new materials science lab for undergraduate students. In addition, $7 million in funding from the State of Minnesota that were part of the University of Minnesota's allocation for Higher Education Asset Preservation and Replacement (HEAPR) funds were also used to upgrade windows and other infrastructure improvements.
Funded by the National Science Foundation through the University of Minnesota MRSEC under Award Number DMR-2011401
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