Dear colleagues, alums, supporters and friends,
As we bid farewell to another graduating class and reflect on the achievements of the past semester, I am filled with a sense of pride and gratitude. Spring commencement marks not only the culmination of hard work and dedication for our graduates but also a moment of reflection for our entire department. Our newsletters allow us to look back and recognize the milestones, challenges, and contributions of our faculty, staff, students, alumni and supporters before turning the page to a new chapter.
A consistent theme in our department’s story is our faculty continue to lead the way, whether in research or recognition.
With his recent NSF CAREER Award, Honggyu Kim, Ph.D., will be working to fill a critical knowledge gap in controlling and characterizing ferroelectric ceramic materials. From cloud storage to social media to AI, information output has surged worldwide, emphasizing a data processing bottleneck widely known as the “memory wall,” and Kim believes these materials may hold the key to breaking through it.
Congratulations to Tori Miller, Ph.D., selected by ASM International for the 2024 Bradley Stoughton Award for Early Career Teachers. This award recognizes her dedication as a materials science and engineering educator and mentor, as well as excellence in both teaching and promoting the materials profession. Miller also received the 2023 ASM International Silver Medal for contributions to materials science and engineering.
Alongside celebrating Miller’s accomplishments, we are pleased to introduce our newest faculty members, Guilhem De Hoe, Ph.D., and Jennifer Hite, Ph.D. De Hoe, an expert in polymers and biodegradation, comes to us from his Postdoctoral Research Fellow position at the Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub in Manchester, England. Hite joins us from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and brings her expertise in compound semiconductors to campus.
In addition to welcoming new faculty members, we’d also like to recognize the service of distinguished professor Brij Moudgil, Ph.D., who retired this past February. Since joining the department in 1982, Moudgil’s pioneering research impacted fields ranging from microelectronics to the citrus industry. His work at UF will not soon be forgotten, and we wish him the best of luck in his retirement.
Moudgil was recognized at our spring banquet, as were this year’s alumni award winners, Josh Stopek, Ph.D., and Sanjay Shrivastava, Ph.D. Stopek received the Early Career Alumni Award, and Shrivastava was selected for the Distinguished Alumni Award.
In this newsletter we introduce a new series of professional development stories called Career Engineering, focused on the department’s dedication to student success. In our first edition, we highlight a visit to the Savannah River National Lab (SRNL) aimed to inspire a group of nuclear engineering students by exposing them to SRNL’s missions, innovative research and potential career paths in the nuclear field. We hope you enjoy it.
Our community suffered a tragic loss this past November with the passing of Brice Turner, a nuclear engineering graduate student. In honor of Turner’s memory, his parents, Bridget and Bruce Turner, have established the Brice Turner Memorial Fund to uplift and support graduate students in the UF Department of Materials Science & Engineering. This endowed fund will provide scholarships to students displaying academic excellence, exemplary citizenship, and a demonstrated passion for advancing the fields of Nuclear Engineering and Materials Science.
As always, I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to our entire academic community. Your hard work, dedication and passion for excellence have made this yet another remarkable year.
Thank you all for being a part of our journey, and please connect with us on our social media channels to keep up with the department’s news, stories and events!