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Spring 2008

2008 NSF Graduate Fellowship — Nnenna Adimora

Former MSE Undergraduate student Nnenna Adimora has received one of the prestigious 2008 NSF graduate fellowships. Nnenna graduated from the Materials Science and Engineering department with a Bachelor of Science degree in 2006.

After graduating from UF, Nnenna enrolled the PhD Biomedical Engineering program at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. In the fall of 2006, she was awarded the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship which is a three-year full coverage fellowship for underrepresented minorities pursuing graduate study in a scientific or engineering field. That same year, fall 2006, Nnenna was awarded the GTEC fellowship which is a two-year full coverage fellowship sponsored by Georgia Tech/Emory University School of Medicine Tissue Engineering Research Center (GTEC). GTEC is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center.

Currently, Nnenna works in Dr. Melissa Kemp's laboratory at Georgia Tech. Her current research interests include redox regulatory mechanisms and their resultant effects on signal transduction in cancer cells. This long term goal of her work is to understand how changes in the redox state of cancer cells can be applied in the development of more effective chemotherapeutic drugs. She approaches this topic using both experimental and computational methodologies. She is currently working on a computational model that is capable of simulating the real-time cellular responses to external sources of oxidative stress.

She was invited to speak on her preliminary model findings at last year's Biomedical Engineering Society meeting which took place in Los Angeles, CA in September of 2007. She will be travelling to Pisa, Italy this May to present her work at the Gordon International Conference on Thiol Based Redox Regulation and Signaling. She is currently working on her first manuscript and is extremely excited to continue her work in this field.

She now continues to give back to the community through her involvement in mentoring programs such as Georgia Tech's Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, where she serves as a graduate mentor. Her role as Regional Vice Chair for Region 3 of the National Society of Black Engineers, also gives her the opportunity to serve the community on a grander scale and give back wherever and whenever she can.

2008 NSF Graduate Fellowship — Louis Perez

Former MSE Undergraduate student Louis Perez has received one of the prestigious 2008 NSF graduate fellowships. Louis graduated from the Materials Science and Engineering department with a Bachelor of Science degree in December 2006.

Louis then continued to graduate school at UMass-Amherst under an AGEP sponsored fellowship where he worked with Dr. Gregory N. Tew on multi-functional metal containing copolymers. He then continued to intern at the DuPont Experimental Station in Wilmington, DE for the summer as a GEM Fellow.

Currently, he is at UC-Santa Barbara pursuing a PhD in Materials Engineering. This NSF funding will provide the resources to assist him in the completion of his PhD degree.

2008 NSF Graduate Fellowship — Clayton Cox

Former MSE Graduate student Clayton Cox has received one of the prestigious 2008 NSF graduate fellowships. Clayton graduated from the Materials Science and Engineering department with a Bachelor of Science degree in December 2002 with a concurrent degree in Business Administration and a minor in economics.

Clay continued at UF receiving a Master of Arts degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in International Business receiving that degree in August 2004. He continued in the master's track receiving a Master of Science degree in Materials Science and Engineering in April 2005.

Clay is currently in the PhD program in Interdisciplinary Ecology at UF. This NSF funding will provide the resources to assist him in the completion of his PhD degree.

Alyson Niemeyer becomes a 2008 LANL Star

Alyson is a graduate student from the University of Florida working on her PhD in the field of Materials Science and Engineering. She also has a Bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and a Master of Science degree in materials science and engineering. Her research is in the field of organic electronics and she won an award at the 2007 LANL Student Symposium for her most recent work, which was published in Applied Physics Letters. Beyond academics and research, Alyson is very involved with the LANL Student Association; she is currently the secretary and treasurer and has hosted many events this year, including a Career Advice Panel for current students and a meeting with Director Anastasio.

In addition to being a scientist, Alyson has been a dancer for most of her life. She has choreographed and taught dance in many places across the US and she currently teaches five classes a week at Dance Arts Los Alamos (DALA). The classes are in tap dance and hip-hop, and include all ages and levels of students from 5-year olds to adult classes. She also spent a lot time this year choreographing for and helping with the production of DALA's performance of the Nutcracker ballet.

Fall 2005

Prestigious Scholarships

Four MSE students received prestigious scholarships in record year for UF:

• Lauren Culver - Goldwater Scholarship
• Michelle Kinahan - National Science Foundation Fellowship
• Rekha Nair - National Science Foundation Fellowship
• Robert Tucker - Fulbright Scholarship

View UF's article.

NSF CAREER Award

Professor Juan Nino received the 2005 NSF CAREER Award, the NSF's most prestigious award in support of the early career-development activities of those teacherscholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.

UFRF Professorship

Professor Eric Wachsman received the UFRF Professorship in March. The three-year professorship was created by the University of Florida Research Foundation to "recognize the faculty who have established a distinguished record of research and scholarship that is expected to lead to continuing distinction in their field."

Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award

Professor Paul Holloway received Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award. The UF Graduate School's annual Doctoral Mentoring Award encourages and rewards excellence, innovation and effectiveness in mentoring doctoral students through their final dissertation. Nominations for the award come from current graduate students, graduate alumni, faculty members, graduate coordinators, department chairs, school directors, college deans and higher-level administrators.

Alpha Sigma Mu Distinguished Life Member

Dr. DeHoff was awarded the Distinguished Life Member Award for Alpha Sigma Mu, for achieving and maintaining, throughout a long career, a distinguished international standing in the Materials Science and Engineering.

Faculty Excellence Awards

Each Year, the MSE Faculty are asked to submit nominations for the Faculty Excellence Award, created to encourage and reward excellence, innovation, and effectiveness in teaching, research and service activities to the department. This year, the receipients are: Drs. Fereshteh Ebrahimi, Susan Sinnott and Eric Wachsman.

R & D 100 Award

Dr. Singh, in conjunction with Sinmat Inc. and UF, received the 2005 R & D 100 Award for his work in the development of CMP process for SiC/GaN optoelectronic and power devices, and ultra low k materials. The technology is based on use of unique nanosponge paticle based slurries; soft, elastic, teflon-like particles in nanoscale dimensions that bend, deform, but do not stick or shatter when polishing the surface. Awarding this honor is a sophisticated process, lasting nearly a full year and involving a panel of almost 50 independent technical experts who lend their expertise in evaluating the details of the product entries compared to other existing products and technologies.

Fall 2004 & Spring 2005

Distinguished Alumnus Award

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore has conferred on Brij Moudgil the "Distinguished Alumnus Award" for the year 2003. The award will be made during the Founder's Day Celebrations on March 3, 2005 in Bangalore.

ASM International

ASM International has selected a proposal that Dr. Fuchs submitted with Mr. David Bosarge for K-12 grants ($500). The funding will allow the teacher to continue the program that was started to help Mr. Bosarge obtain funding from Gainesville Raceway this past year.

Electrochemical Society's Electronics Division Award

Steve Pearton has won the Electrochemical Society's Electronics Division Award for "pioneering contributions to semiconductor processing".

SRC Faculty Recognition Award for Student Recruiting

Professors Kevin Jones and Mark Law (ECE) have received the first SRC Faculty Recognition Award for Student Recruiting. This award was given on behalf of their efforts to recruit graduate students with citizenship/permanent resident status in the country where the research is being performed. The SRC program recognizes and provides a monetary incentive to Principal Investigators who are most successful in recruiting students who are native-born and/or naturalized. The program also serves to highlight this challenge and reward those who successfully met the challenge.

R & D Magazine's Award

Rajiv and Deepika Singh have received R & D Magazine's award for one of the 100 most technological significant products. Through their company, Sinmat Inc., they produced a supergentle polish. This polish called Genteel Slurry is a mixture of nanoparticles that polishes the surface of microcircuitry - a process called chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP) - so only thin copper wiring less than one-fiftieth the diameter of a human hair is left to connect to millions of transistors on an integrated circuit device.

Successfull Synthesis

Dr. Paul Holloway's group has successfully synthesized ultrasmall (3.1 nm) yellow-emitting CdS:Mn/ZnS core/shell quantum dots (Qdots) that exhibit high photoluminescence efficiency (>18%) and excellent photostability. These novel materials have been further investigated for the application to a potential biomaging marker. For in vivo bio-labeling applications, it is desired to incorporate additional properties such as radioopacity and paramagnetism in the same probe (multifunctional probe). This will allow noninvasive tumor diagnosis using CT (Computer Tomography) scan and/or MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scan before performing the surgery.

Working with Raytheon

Dr. Paul Holloway's group is working with Raytheon to demonstrate that diffractive optics can effectively replace refractive or reflective optics in imaging systems with a savings in weight and volume. To accomplish this, his team will deliver a prototype imaging system to replace the current optical system in the Medium Range Munitions (MRM). Raytheon is developing the MRM for the U.S. Army, featuring an Un-Cooled IR Seeker to provide immediate capability against ground targets for Future Combat Systems (FCS), Block 1. Spiral developments will add a Tri-Mode Seeker which will feature Un-Cooled IR, Millimeter Wave and Semi-Active Laser (SAL) capabilities. Size and weight are at a premium in this 120mm projectile and the photon sieve (PS) technology being developed here will eliminate the gimbal used to provide a wide field of regard (FOR), as well as to substantially simplify the optics while maintaining the original seeker performance.

Lorentz Workshop

Jack Mecholsky is one of 15 people in the world asked to speak at the Lorentz Workshop held in Leiden, The Netherlands on November 14-19, 2004. The workshop is entitled "On the Statistical-Physics Aspects of Patterns in the Fracture of Disordered Materials."

Grant from NSF - ITR

Susan Sinnott and Simon Phillpot have received a grant from NSF - ITR: "Life-Size Atomistic Simulation of Fabrication and Operation of Multi-Component Nanostructures". They will develop techniques to simulate heterogeneously integrated systems of semiconductors, ionic materials and metals. The approach developed will be implemented in a massively-parallel environment allowing the simulation of, for example, the realtime switching behavior of a life-sized ferroelectric nanocapacitor.

Grant from NSF - NIRT

Elliott Douglas, Laurie Gower, John J. Mecholsky, Jr., and Donna Wheeler (Co. State Univ.) have received a grant from NSF - NIRT: "Nanostructured Composites Mimicking Bone". Using the polymer-induced liquid-precursor (PILP) process, invented by Dr. Gower, the group will produce and characterize collagen fibers embedded in nanometer size mineral crystals, in order to make synthetic material that mimics artificial bone.