Awards and Accolades News

  • Sep 16
    2019
    People tend to only think about energy storage when their laptop or cellphone batteries are running out of juice. However, energy storage is a key concept for utility companies, who are constantly managing the supply and demand of energy on the electrical grid. The more variability that exists in supply and demand, the more difficult it is to stabilize the electrical grid... read more »
  • Sep 16
    2019
    UC Santa Barbara hosts the nation’s first NSF-funded Quantum Foundry, a center for developing materials and devices for quantum information-based technologies. We hear a lot these days about the coming quantum revolution. Efforts to understand, develop, and characterize quantum materials — defined broadly as those displaying characteristics that can be explained only by... read more »
  • Aug 21
    2019
    Prof. Craig Hawker and Prof. Michael Chabinyc have authored commentaries in Nature Reviews Materials on professional development for graduate students.     In “A generosity of spirit”, Prof. Hawker discusses the importance of developing research networks and mentoring in both academic and industrial careers. In “Finding and... read more »
  • Jun 17
    2019
    Professor Chris Bates has received a 2019-2020 Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship. "The purpose of the Hellman Fellows program is to provide substantial support for the research of promising assistant professors who have served at least two years at the assistant professor level, and who show capacity for great distinction in their research." Congratulations Chris!
  • Apr 29
    2019
    Professor Susanne Stemmer has received the UCSB Faculty Senate Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award for 2018-2019. This award recognizes her outstanding contributions in training graduate students for careers in research and teaching. During her career at UCSB, she has graduated 16 Ph.D. students and 6 M.S. students along with mentoring of many post-doctoral students. Her... read more »
  • Apr 17
    2019
    Professor Rachel A. Segalman, Edward Noble Kramer Professor and Chemical Engineering Department Chair and Professor, Materials Department at UC Santa Barbara, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The new class will be inducted at a ceremony Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday, October 12, 2019. The Induction weekend will begin with an event on... read more »
  • Mar 21
    2019
    Professor Michael Chabinyc, Chair of the Materials Department at the UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering, has been named a Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS), a distinction that “recognizes outstanding contributions to the field, including research, leadership, and service that have advanced the mission of the materials community world-wide.” read more
  • Mar 12
    2019
    In its annual ranking of leading graduate and professional programs at American universities, U.S. News & World Report magazine has rated two of UC Santa Barbara’s programs among the top 10 in the nation. In the 2020 U.S. News list of “Best Graduate Schools,” UC Santa Barbara’s materials program is ranked No. 1 among public institutions and No. 3 overall. The spots... read more »
  • Mar 5
    2019
    It will be a feat of engineering and physics at the smallest scales, but it could open the biggest doors — to new science and more advanced technologies. UC Santa Barbara physicists Ania Jayich and David Weld, and materials scientist Kunal Mukherjee, are teaming up to build an atom-defect hybrid quantum system — a sensor technology that would use the power of quantum... read more »
  • Feb 14
    2019
    UCSB Materials and Mechanical Engineering Professor Irene Beyerlein has been honored with two separate awards from The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS).  The Awards will be presented at the Awards Dinner of the 2019 TMS Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX, March 13, 2019. First, Prof. Beyerlein is the recipient of the TMS 2019 Brimacombe Medal.  This mid-... read more »
  • Feb 14
    2019
    The Materials Department is pleased to announce a new professorship, the Mehrabian Interdisciplinary Endowed Chair.  This Chaired Professorship was established by Robert and Victoria Mehrabian, longtime friends and benefactors of the UCSB College of Engineering, to support the scholarly activities of a faculty member jointly appointed between the... read more »
  • Feb 14
    2019
    UCSB engineering Professor John Bowers’ group develops a high-performance quantum dot mode-locked laser on silicon. “The level of data traffic in the world is going up very, very fast,” said Bowers, co-author of a paper on the new technology in the journal Optica. Generally speaking, he explained, the transmission and data capacity of state-of-the-art... read more »
  • Nov 29
    2018
    Tuesday, November 27, 2018 Four professors in UC Santa Barbara’s College of Engineering are among the most influential scientists in the world, according to the 2018 Highly Cited Researchers List released by Clarivate Analytics. The list includes 6,000 scientists whose research ranked among the top one percent in terms of references and citations in journals from... read more »
  • Nov 27
    2018
    Professor Ram Seshadri joins the ranks as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for 2018. “For distinguished contributions to the domain of structure-property relations in crystalline inorganic materials, particularly associated with developing predictive understanding of polar, magnetic and luminescent materials.” Election as an AAAS... read more »
  • Nov 21
    2018
    Professor Chris Bates has received a National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for his research on polymers.  The NSF CAREER award is the NSF’s most prestigious award for junior faculty who are effectively integrating research and education.  Prof. Bates' research involves the synthesis and characterization of block copolymers that self... read more »
  • Nov 9
    2018
    Guillermo Bazan, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and of materials, is featured in the journal Advanced Materials 2018 Hall of Fame, a series of articles that takes a snapshot of the leading research and best insights materials science has to offer while acting as a touchstone for future materials researchers. Bazan, whose research group focuses on the “... read more »
  • Aug 23
    2018
    The 21st century presents the world with multiple sustainability challenges, especially on the energy front. Energy demand is growing rapidly, but fossil-fuel combustion drives climate change, creating a need to transform how we generate, supply, transmit, store, and use energy. Water is generally required to produce energy, and purifying water requires energy, increasing... read more »
  • Jul 3
    2018
    The Carnegie Corporation names Professor Shuji Nakamura one of 38 ‘Great Immigrants’. Of all the Nobel Prize winners in the United States, roughly a third are  — or have been — immigrants. At UC Santa Barbara, four of the campus’s six Nobel laureates are foreign born. Among them is UCSB professor Shuji Nakamura of Japan, who won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for... read more »
  • Jun 8
    2018
     Drs. Jean Charles Stinville and  McLean P. Echlin of the Materials Department received the 2018 Hetényi Award from the Society for Experimental Mechanics during the annual meeting of the society in June of 2018.  The Hetényi Award is given annually for the Best Research Paper published annually in the journal Experimental Mechanics.  The paper was entitled “Sub-... read more »
  • Apr 24
    2018
    '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 »
  • Apr 16
    2018
    Some sixty people, including UC Santa Barbara faculty colleagues, alumni, and industry partners, convened at UCSB’s Loma Pelona Center on March 16 to honor emeritus professor Larry Coldren, a giant in electrical engineering and materials science, particularly as they relate to photonic integrated circuits and tunable lasers. Some 24 speakers took the podium over several... read more »
  • Apr 12
    2018
    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 »
  • Apr 10
    2018
    U.S. News & World Report has ranked UC Santa Barbara No. 5 among public universities. UC Santa Barbara’s College of Engineering graduate program was ranked No. 12 among public universities in its annual ranking of nation’s “Best Engineering Schools.” The UCSB College of Engineering (CoE) earned the No. 24 position among both public... read more »
  • Mar 23
    2018
    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 »
  • Jan 25
    2018
    Professor Chris Palmstrøm is the 2018 David Adler Lectureship Award recipient, "For innovative experimental research, lectures, and writing in the areas of dissimilar materials epitaxy, heterostructures and interfaces in thin films". This award recognizes an outstanding contributor to the field of materials physics, who is noted for the quality of his/her... read more »