Accolades: Notable Achievements from Faculty and Students

Posted on January 26, 2018 by tceweb

UT Art-to-Part Project Makes AMO Top Five

US Department of Energy logo

The Tickle College of Engineering team’s art-to-part composite snow sled project was selected as No. 1 of the top five highlights of 2017 by the Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) of the US Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Students were challenged to modernize a popular childhood pastime by redesigning snow sleds with more innovative techniques and materials. Students designed, built, and tested three composite snow sled prototypes that were lighter in weight and more durable than traditional snow sleds.

Johnson Published by Advanced Photon Source

Jackie Johnson, associate professor at the UT Space Iinstitute, co-authored Teasing Out Iron’s Structural Subtleties, recently published via Advance Photo Source.

The paper addresses new results in studying the behavior of iron at high temperatures and pressures, focusing on its role in our understanding of Earth’s interior.

Johnson’s multinational team also included researchers from Materials Development, Inc., Argonne National Laboratory, Stony Brook University, University College London.

Mukherjee featured in Journal of Biophotonics

MABE Assistant Professor Dibyendu Mukherjee is the principal investigator and corresponding author of the featured article on the back cover of the January 2018 issue of the Journal of Biophotonics. The article is “In-vitro analysis of early calcification in aortic valvular interstitial cells using Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS),” co-written with Seyyed Ali Davari, Shirin Masjedi, and Zannatul Ferdous.

MSE Graduate Student Earns Multiple Awards

Michael Stanford, MSE graduate student — Michael Stanford

Michael Stanford recently earned the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Graduate Student Researcher Award, along with two others. The ORNL award is for outstanding research contributions to focused ion and electron beam-induced processing and defect manipulation in 2D materials.

Stanford studies with Philip Rack, professor and Leonard G. Penland Chair and associate department head in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

The student researcher also received two awards from the American Vacuum Society (AVS):

Dorothy M. and Earl S. Hoffman Scholarship: One of five named National Student Awards established to recognize and encourage excellence in graduate studies in the sciences and technologies of interest to the society.
James Harper Award: The premier competitive graduate student award for the Thin Films Division of AVS, it recognizes research contributions as well as oral presentation skills.

DeJager Joins Strongwell

Recent chemical engineering graduate Ty DeJager has joined Strongwell as a process engineer. He previously worked in the Strongwell lab as an engineering intern.

DeJager also has worked for Diamond Vogel Paints in Orange City, Iowa, as an engineering intern. After graduation from UT, he successfully hiked the 2,600 mile Pacific Crest Trail from the United States/Mexican border to British Columbia, Canada. He resides with his dog, Jake, in Bristol, Virginia.

Gragston wins Best Student Paper at SciTech Forum

Mark Gragston, PhD student in the MABE department, won Best Student Paper in the Aerodynamic Measurement Technology—Spectroscopic Technologies Session at the 2018 AIAA Science and Technology (SciTech) Forum held earlier this month in Orlando.

The winning paper, entitled “Acoustic measurements of molecular oxygen REMPI,” focuses on Gragston’s work to extract gas phase temperature by listening to the effects of selective multiphoton ionization of molecular oxygen.

Gragston’s advisor Associate Professor Zhili Zhang and former Postdoc Yue Wu are co-authors on the paper. The paper has also been published in Optics Letters, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Optical Society of America.