Daniel Oropeza receives the Young Investigator Award from the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. UC Santa Barbara materials assistant professor Daniel Oropeza has been recognized with the 2025 Young Investigator Award from the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), the nation’s largest association supporting Hispanics in STEM. The award, part of SHPE’... read more »

An article was recently published in the journal Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics detailing the life and career of Professor Emeritus Fyl Pincus.  Fyl was a founding member of the Materials Department at its inception and has served in numerous leadership roles at the UC Santa Barbara.  Prof. Pincus's unique career spanned theoretical contributions to diverse... read more »

Prof. Jeff Sakamoto has been selected as a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society, Class of 2025.  He will be recoginized at the 248th ECS Meeting this fall in Chicago.  

Elizabeth 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 »

He 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 »

Prof. 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 »

UC 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 »

UC 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 »

Professor 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 »

Prof. Raphaële Clément has been selected as a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar for 2024. Those selected are within the first five years of their academic careers, have each created an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education. Each Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar receives an unrestricted research grant of $100,000. Prof. Clément's ... read more »

Materials faculty members Raphaële Clemént, Tresa Pollock, Angela Pitenis, Ananya Renuka Balakrishna, and Sriram Krishnamoorthy have received major instrumentation awards from the NSF, to continue maintaining and improving our world-class facilities. See the full story here.