News
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Jul 29
2025From UC Santa Barbara's The Current. Distinguished Professor Chris Van de Walle of UC Santa Barbara’s Materials Department has received the 2025 Heinrich Welker Award in recognition of his “development and application of computational methods to elucidate the properties of interfaces, defects, doping, polarization, and loss mechanisms in compound... read more » -
Jul 29
2025Professor Shuji Nakamura received the 2025 Pioneer Medal Award at the Asian American Pioneer Medal Symposium and Ceremony, hosted by the Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF), in partnership with the Stanford University Asian American Research Center. Professor Nakamura was honored for inventing the blue LED, energy-efficient lighting and advanced displays. More... read more » -
Jul 17
2025For the diligent computational materials scientist, 2025 started with a bang UC Santa Barbara materials professor Chris Van de Walle, a widely recognized computational materials expert, has had a busy first half of the year. It actually began even before January, when in fall 2024 he received the American Physical Society’s 2025 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational... read more » -
Jul 7
2025On June 17, Jeff Sakamoto, professor of materials and mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara, was announced as one of twelve members of the 2025 Class of Fellows of The Electrochemical Society (ECS). Sakamoto, a widely recognized battery expert who came to UCSB in 2024 from the University of Michigan, with three decades of research experience in the field of... read more » -
Jul 7
2025Two current graduate students in the UC Santa Barbara Materials Department, Anya Mulligan and Logan Winston, have received prestigious 2025 Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF). They are among the one thousand students nationwide who were offered 2025 Fellowships, which come with three years of financial support, totaling nearly $150,... read more » -
Jun 30
2025Congratulations to Scott Berens for receiving Best Poster Award at the ECI Thermal and Environmental Barrier Coating Materials conference held in Irsee Germany in June 2025. This is the pre-eminent international meeting on high temperature coatings, bringing together world-class experts to discuss materials, degradation mechanisms, processing innovations, and... read more » -
May 7
2025From McGill Univerity. McGill’s top award is the Honorary Doctorate, the University’s way of paying tribute to those who have made their mark through outstanding scholarly, scientific or artistic achievement, or by virtue of exceptional contributions to the public good through their professional or philanthropic activity. “McGill’s honorary doctorate... read more » -
Apr 30
2025Irene Beyerlein has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies. At UC Santa Barbara, she leads pioneering research in mechanics and materials science, advancing the design of resilient, high-performance materials through multiscale modeling and experimentation. “Our UC Santa Barbara community is... read more » -
Apr 29
2025Lillian Hughes was awarded the MRS graduate student silver award at the MRS Spring Meeting. MRS Graduate Student Awards are intended to honor and encourage graduate students whose academic achievements and current materials research display a high level of excellence and distinction. MRS seeks to recognize students of exceptional ability who show promise for significant... read more » -
Apr 23
2025The UCSB Materials Department congratulates alumna Wennie Wang, Ph.D. (’18), on receiving the 2025 American Physical Society Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, which recognizes outstanding early-career achievements by a woman physicist. Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is honored for her pioneering contributions to materials science,... read more » -
Apr 21
2025Elizabeth Murphy, who pursues research in the area of materials chemistry, has won the prestigious 2025 Henkel Award for Outstanding Graduate Research in Polymer Science & Engineering. The accolade, which Murphy received on February 21, a week before her PhD defense, acknowledges her exceptional work in developing a versatile strategy to accelerate the discovery of... read more » -
Apr 16
2025The UCSB Materials Department congratulates alumna Natasha Vermaak, Ph.D. (’10), on receiving the 2026 Acta Materialia Mary Fortune Award, which recognizes global leadership, technical excellence, outreach, and mentoring in the field of materials science and engineering. Vermaak is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics at... read more » -
Apr 8
2025Another outstanding showing from one of the very best materials departments anywhere. Led by the materials graduate program, which placed first among public universities in its field, six graduate programs in UC Santa Barbara’s College of Engineering (COE) ranked among the nation’s best in U.S. News & World Report’s 2025 Best Graduate Engineering Schools... read more » -
Jan 8
2025He receives the Herman F. Mark Polymer Chemistry Award, named for a pioneer in the field. Craig Hawker, whose decades of groundbreaking research as a professor in the departments of Materials, Chemistry, and Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara have led to major advances in polymer science, has been awarded the 2025 Herman F. Mark Polymer Chemistry Award. The award... read more » -
Nov 19
2024Prof. Raphaële Clément has been awarded the 2024 Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship from the Royal Society of Chemistry. This is an international award for early career researchers that have made significant contributions to the field of materials chemistry. You can find the announcement here, and an associated themed collection of Raphaële's papers here. -
Oct 15
2024Prof. Chris Van de Walle, a distinguished professor of materials at UC Santa Barbara, has been awarded the American Physical Society’s 2025 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics, the highest honor given by APS for work in that field. The prize, which dates back to 1993, honors Aneesur Rahman, a founder of the field of molecular dynamics who pioneered... read more » -
Oct 10
2024Prof. Daniel Oropeza, an assistant professor of materials at UC Santa Barbara, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Early Career Faculty Initiative grant. A joint endeavor between LLNL and UC National Laboratories at the UC Office of the President, the initiative seeks to foster long-term academic partnerships and... read more » -
Oct 4
2024UC Santa Barbara materials professor Stephen Wilson is among the 149 researchers who have been elected fellows of the American Physical Society (APS) for 2024. No more than one-half of one percent of the society’s 50,000 members receive the honor from their peers each year in recognition of their exceptional original research and publication, or significant innovative... read more » -
Sep 24
2024Prof. Raphaële Clément has been awarded the 2024 International Battery Association Early Career Research Award. The IBA Early Career Research Award is give to someone who has made outstanding contributions to advances in electrochemical energy conversion and storage research at an early career stage. Raphaële received the award at the IBA meeing in Halifax, Naov Scotia... read more » -
Sep 24
2024The Materials Department is excited to welcome our incoming class of graduate students! The 46 incoming students are about to start on an exciting adventure of research and learning, and we hope we can help them achieve their scientific and career goals. -
Sep 24
2024Lucas Erich, a second-year materials PhD student at UC Santa Barbara, has received a prestigious NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO) Fellowship. Sponsored by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, the NSTGRO program supports researchers pursuing ideas that show significant potential to contribute to the agency’s goal of creating innovative... read more » -
Sep 24
2024Two materials graduate students, Joshua Baston and Griffin Tong (pictured left to right), have won a significant national award to pursue their respective doctoral research projects. “This is a very competitive award, so we are proud of these students,” said Leila J. Rupp, Interim Anne and Michael Towbes Graduate Dean. “We also applaud their faculty advisors, who do the... read more » -
Sep 17
2024UC Santa Barbara materials professor Jim Speck is one of only eleven people — from an initial group of 170 applicants, of whom 27 were invited to submit full proposals — to have received a prestigious 2024 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF) from the U.S. Department of Defense. The awards, up to $3 million each, allow recipients to “explore the frontiers of knowledge... read more » -
Aug 12
2024UC Santa Barbara materials assistant professor Daniel Oropeza has received the Global Young Investigator Award from the American Ceramic Society’s Engineering Ceramics Division. The annual accolade recognizes outstanding young ceramic engineers and scientists for their significant achievements to the field. “I am honored to be selected for this award and recognized as an... read more » -
Jul 16
2024Professor Shuji Nakamura has been selected to join the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame (ESHF). The professor of electrical and computer engineering and of materials was elected “for pioneering invention and development of the blue light emitting diode (LED), a major breakthrough in lighting technology which made possible the white light energy-efficient LED lighting... read more »
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