Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Scott McCormack is part of a multi-university team awarded $7.5 million over five years from the Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, or MURI, program.
Through teaching, mentorship and outreach, the assistant professor champions accessible materials science education, emphasizing real-world connections and hands-on experiments to inspire future scientists.
In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, the University of California, Davis, College of Engineering recognizes women in engineering, their journey to and in the field, and how they promote a diverse, equitable and inclusive world.
Meet some remarkable women in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and learn how they inspire inclusion in engineering.
As editors and members of editorial boards for academic journals, materials science and engineering professors at UC Davis are contributing their expertise and knowledge to influence the field and stay on trend with the newest, cutting-edge research.
New research published in Physical Review Letters shows how an experiment with lasers and magnets resulted in the domain walls within ferromagnetic layers moving at previously unheard-of speeds, paving the way for more sustainable and energy-efficient data storage.
Equatic, co-founded by UC Davis materials science engineer Erika La Plante, was recognized for its cutting-edge technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and creates hydrogen, a clean energy alternative.
Materials science and engineering professor Marina Leite has received $1 million to make switchable photonic devices more efficient with hybrid perovskites, a class of materials with physical properties that can be controlled through light alone.
It is with great sadness that the Department of Materials Science and Engineering announces the passing of Distinguished Professor Emeritus Subhash Mahajan. He is remembered in the community as a gifted mentor and generous friend and colleague.
Mahajan was considered one of the foremost experts on electronic materials and slip and twinning phenomena. His research focused on understanding the interrelationship between structure properties in semiconductors and the deformation behavior of solids.
Amir Saeidi, assistant professor of teaching in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was selected as one of eight Public Scholarship Faculty Fellows the University of California, Davis Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement announced the 2023-24 cohort on Tuesday.
Erika La Plante, a new assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, leveraged her geochemistry background while applying the materials science paradigms to her unique research on cementitious materials.
For many new faculty members in the College of Engineering, the interdisciplinary advantages of the University of California, Davis, are welcome discoveries. Mingwei Zhang, a new assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was already very familiar with the unique connections UC Davis creates across campus though.
Marina Leite is on her fourth cell phone. A professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Davis, and a Chancellor’s Fellow, Leite is holding out on upgrading her phone because tossing her old one would produce excess waste.
The inside of a living cell is crowded with large, complex molecules. New research on how these molecules could spontaneously organize themselves could further our understanding of how cells manage their essential biochemistry in the crowded space.
We all have experience with water turning from solid to liquid to gas and back again.
But knowing what happens scientifically during those transitions is an essential, yet unanswered scientific question that Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Jeremy Mason and his research group are pursuing.
Researchers at the University of California, Davis College of Engineering are using machine learning to identify new materials for high-efficiency solar cells. Using high-throughput experiments and machine learning-based algorithms, they have found it is possible to forecast the materials’ dynamic behavior with very high accuracy, without the need to perform as many experiments.
Peifen Lyu ’19, Ph.D. ’25 has created a magnesium-based nanoscale optical device that dissolves in water and changes colors in displays. It creates a color change across several applications, such as a coating for pills or as sensors in environmental science for testing different chemical compositions.
The first time he learned about the science behind teaching, Materials Science and Engineering Assistant Professor of Teaching Amir Saeidi knew how he wanted to make a difference. The social sciences and humanities students in his pedagogical fellowship program were all familiar with concepts like active learning, but Saeidi had never seen anything like them in his engineering classes and decided he needed to use and promote that.
University of California, Davis, Chancellor Gary S. May has appointed Professor Emeritus Jeffery Gibeling to serve as the interim vice chancellor for research effective March 1. May will form a recruitment advisory committee soon to conduct a nationwide search for the next vice chancellor. He anticipates Gibeling will serve in the interim role for approximately six months.
Alumni Robert ’73 and Carolyn Caligiuri ’74 have given a $1.27 million endowment to the MSE department at UC Davis to establish the Amiya Mukherjee Memorial Fellowship in honor of Robert Caligiuri’s first mentor. The gift, the largest ever to MSE, will support competitive doctoral students and boost the department's stature.
In June 2022, Materials Science and Engineering Associate Professor and UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow Marina S. Leite was elevated to senior member status by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Senior membership is the highest grade that IEEE members can apply for, and achieving this honor requires an extensive professional background in IEEE-designated fields over the span of ten years with five years of significant performance.
To investigate the functional properties of electronic and magnetic materials, Assistant Professor Roopali Kukreja leverages the coherent and highly stable x-ray beams available at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.
This Newscriptster has always loved a good fantasy epic or sci-fi adventure as an escape from ordinary reality. But sometimes it’s fun to mix fantasy and reality. In fact, there’s a whole subgenre of science communication exploring how stuff from books and movies stacks up against real-world science.
Three materials science and engineering faculty at UC Davis—Professor Ricardo Castro, Assistant Professor Scott McCormack and Distinguished Professor Emeritus James Shackelford—were recently featured on Ceramic Tech Chat, the official podcast of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS).
I received my B.S. from Cornell University in 1998 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 2000 and 2004, respectively, all in Materials Science and Engineering. I was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley with Professor Yuri Suzuki in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering before joining the Materials Science and Engineering Department at UC Davis in July 2006. After serving as Vice-Chair from 2017-2020, I became the first female chair of the department at UC Davis in July 2020.
I did my undergrad in chemistry and Ph.D. in physics, both in Brazil. While a Ph.D. student, I was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart (Germany) and at the Department of Applied Physics at Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) working with semiconductor materials. I started working with solar cells when I was a post-doctoral scholar at Caltech between 2008 and 2011. After a 2-year appointment at NIST, I moved to the University of Maryland as an assistant professor, and then became an associate professor. I am currently an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and a UC Davis Chancellor's Fellow.
