PhD student Krishna Nittala has recently been selected to receive a 2011 Engineering Outstanding International Student Award by the University of Florida International Center (UFIC). Krishna will receive the award at UFIC Awards Ceremony on November 17. Krishna has been a Graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering since August of 2007. Krishna is working on a project sponsored by Sandia National Labs through the National Institute for Nano-Engineering (NINE) initiative.

Under the NINE project, Krishna’s work seeks to better understand fundamental processes at play during solution deposition and high temperature crystallization of ferroelectric thin films. In collaboration with the Advanced Photon Source, we have developed in situ diffraction based techniques that can probe structural changes during rapid annealing. As part of this project, Krishna has published two manuscripts thus far in the Journal of Materials Science and Advances in X-ray Analysis. Krishna also plays a significant role in Dr. Jones research group by being involved in other collaborative diffraction experiments. Through this type of interaction, Krishna has contributed to three additional publications in Journal of the American Chemical Society, Journal of the American Ceramic Society, and Applied Physics Letters. He is also highly involved in mentoring of other graduate and undergraduate students in the areas of thin films and diffraction.