Meet Isabella Loureiro Muller Costa.
Costa is a third year Ph.D. candidate in materials science and engineering at the University of California, Davis. Isabella is in the Ceramic and Glass Industry Foundation, or CGIF, President's Council of Student Advisors and brought CGIF Mini Kits to Brazil last year to expose students to materials science.
In 1995, Jack Yao ’96 was part of a team of UC Davis students that competed in Robocon — short for robot contest — in Osaka, Japan. The competition, which was nationally televised in Japan, challenged teams to design and build rugby-playing robots to autonomously navigate an obstacle course, place a rugby ball on a tee and kick the ball between goal posts.
Materials Science and Engineering Ph.D. candidate Cassondra Brayfield was named a recipient of the Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship under its Women in Technology program. Brayfield was selected based on leadership skills, recognition of accomplishments, endorsement from professors, and drive to shape the world of technology.
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.
With support from the Department of Energy Office of Science’s Graduate Student Research program, Materials Science and Engineering Ph.D. student Dayne Sasaki will be using the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to conduct groundbreaking research that combines the fields of artificial spin ices and complex oxides.
Mingwei Zhang, Ph.D. ’21 used his time at UC Davis to grow his research career and plans to pay forward the generosity and mentorship he received from the materials science and engineering department.
The first generation of computers used vacuum tubes. The second, transistors and the third, integrated circuits. Each new generation allowed computers to be faster, smaller and more energy efficient. Now, as the world stretches beyond the limits of integrated circuits, what does the fourth generation of computing look like?
The Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Davis invites applications for two faculty positions at the tenured/tenure-track positions at the Assistant or Associate Professor level. Only one of the positions may be offered at the tenured Associate Professor level. For full consideration, applications must be completed by November 13, 2022.
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.
Children in Maripá de Minas don’t think of pursuing a higher education, likely because they don’t know what opportunities await them in Brazil or beyond. Isabella Loureiro Muller Costa, a third year Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis and Brazil native, plans to show these students what their future could entail with her outreach efforts.
Materials Science and Engineering Ph.D. candidate Pallavi D. Sambre is taking the first steps toward engineering lifelike artificial materials that reconstitute a cell’s ability to change their membrane shape to move from one part of the body to another.
The natural curiosity about the world Sevag Momjian '22 has always had led him to materials science and engineering, and he's excited to help the field realize its potential to solve some of the greatest challenges of the 21st Century.
The Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) celebrated its graduating seniors from the class of 2022 during the Senior Send-off held on Sunday, June 12, 2022. The graduates and their families were invited to Kemper Hall after the main graduation ceremony held at UC Davis Health Stadium to recognize and celebrate their accomplishments.
After completing a bachelor's degree in philosophy, Chad Serrao '22 decided to go back to school to pursue engineering and became hooked on materials science and engineering and looks forward to playing a role in using the field to build a sustainable future.
Avery Adams '22 was drawn to materials science and engineering because of the versatility of the field that allows her to do both experimental and applied work for a wide range of fields.
Pooja Rao '22 thought she would get her B.S. and immediately leave academia, but she developed a love for research as part of Assistant Professor Roopali Kukreja's group and decided to continue her studies as a master's student.
Meghna Srivastava is this year’s recipient of the of the College of Engineering’s Jeffery C. Gibeling Master’s Thesis Excellence Award, which recognizes the M.S. student who has submitted the best master's thesis. Srivastava earned her M.S. in materials science and engineering under the mentorship of Associate Professor Marina Leite.
Second-year materials science and engineering Ph.D. student Margaret Duncan, part of Associate Professor Marina Leite’s lab, received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. The fellowship is the oldest and one of the most prestigious of its kind and it recognizes and supports outstanding STEM graduate students who have the potential to become knowledgeable experts and significantly contribute to research, teaching, and innovation.
UC Davis engineers are innovating at high and low temperatures to enable travel at hypersonic speeds and sustainably keep food safe and fresh, respectively.
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.
Materials Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Scott McCormack and his team received $1.4M from the Air Force Office of Science and Research to reduce uncertainty and standardized processing techniques for ultra-high temperature ceramics.
Ultra-high temperature ceramics (UHTCs) are ceramic materials that melt at temperatures above 3000˚C, nearly 5500˚F. Their ability to withstand extreme heat loads makes them ideal for building hypersonic vehicles and platforms, but UHTCs can be difficult to process reliably.
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.
