'Intellect, Creativity and Commitment'. Craig Hawker elected to the 238th class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The academy is an independent policy research center that conducts interdisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. Since its founding in 1780, the academy has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George... read more »

The Nobel Prize winner credited with inventing energy-efficient LED light bulbs received an honorary degree at University of Massachusetts Lowell on Wednesday afternoon, the school announced. Shuji Nakamura was presented with an honorary degree and gave the keynote speech during the annual Tripathy Endowed Memorial Lecture. Nakamura was the 2014 Nobel Laureate in Physics... read more »

Materials Professor Omar Saleh receives the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation, which grants about 20 Bessel awards each year.  To be nominated for the Bessel Research Award, scientists and scholars must be internationally renowned in their field, have completed their doctorate less than 18 years ago, are expected to continue producing... read more »

   Blue and white gallium nitride-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are the backbone of new energy-efficient lighting systems. The efficiency of an LED white light bulb is 20 times that of a traditional incandescent bulb. The US government’s department of energy estimates in that country alone, the transition to LED lighting will save 261 terawatt hours (TWh) of... read more »

First, Prof. Pollock is the recipient of the TMS 2018 Morris Cohen Award.  This award recognizes an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the science and/or technology of materials properties.  Prof. Pollock was cited for “seminal contributions to the development of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering and its application to understanding the... read more »

The metal body of a smartphone is made of a crystalline material, which has a highly ordered arrangement of atoms. Dropping the phone on its metal back would, at worst, result in a dent. Further, because such crystalline materials have a clear order to disrupt, with potential weak points defined by “defects” in that order, it would be relatively easy to predict which... read more »

Working with scientific images is arduous, and no simple platform exists for sharing them. That is all about to change. UC Santa Barbara engineers and researchers have been awarded a $3.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to build a large-scale distributed image-processing infrastructure (LIMPID) through a broad,... read more »

A mathematician and her collaborators figured out how to predict electrons’ behavior by studying the mathematics of waves

Monday, October 9, 2017 High-strength alloys have been critical in the development of aircraft wings and fuselages, and other high-performance applications in demanding environments where margins for error are extremely small. Many alloys could also be useful in additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, which, at the highest level, makes it possible to fabricate... read more »

The UCSB Materials Department welcomes Assistant Professor Raphaële Clément, to the Inorganic Materials area of research. The overall goal of Prof. Clément’s research is to elucidate the relationship between the structure and (photo)electrochemical properties of inorganic materials used in solar cells and rechargeable batteries, a key step towards designing new clean... read more »

The UCSB Materials Department welcomed Assistant Professor John Harter on July 1 to the Inorganic Materials area of research. Prof. Harter’s research interests are broadly focused on “quantum materials,” such as unconventional superconductors and strongly-correlated electron systems, where the consequences of quantum mechanics manifest in new and interesting ways. His... read more »