MSE Assistant Professor Mariya Zhuravleva continues to establish herself as a foremost authority on scintillators and to cement the international reputation of the Scintillation Materials Research Center as one of the leading scintillator research facilities in the world.

In recognition of her recent work and capabilities, Zhuravleva has been awarded two new grants, totaling 4.8 million dollars, from the United States Department of Homeland Security.

A scintillator emits light when struck by ionizing radiation and is central to such applications as medical imaging and the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

On the first project, “Entropic Approach to Low Cost and High-Performance Ceramic Scintillators for X-Ray Radiography”, she leads a team that includes MSE colleagues, Chuck Melcher and Kurt Sickafus, and an industrial partner, Radiation Monitoring Devices, Inc.  This team is applying the high-entropy concept to design new multi-rare-earth aluminum garnet structures and synthesize transparent optical ceramic scintillators using hot pressing densification.

Zhuravleva serves as the UTK lead on the second project, titled, “Thallium-based Inorganic Perovskite Scintillators for X-Ray Detection”, also performed in collaboration with Melcher and Radiation Monitoring Devices, Inc. The team will investigate single-crystalline scintillators based on inorganic halide perovskites and explore the relationship between structural dimensionality and excitonic localization. Both projects are funded by the newly created office of “Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction” at the Department of Homeland Security.  These grants will support several new MSE graduate and undergraduate students.