The department is pleased to announce three new promotions for Nathan Gabrielson, André Schleife, and Daniel Shoemaker, pending approval by the Board of Trustees. We recognize the hard work that goes into this achievement and wish to congratulate them on their new status.
Senior Lecturer, Nathan Gabrielson
Gabrielson completed his BS degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Northwestern University and his MS and PhD degrees in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with Prof. Dan Pack. His graduate research was focused on drug delivery and non-viral gene therapy techniques. Following the completion of his graduate work, Gabrielson was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology in Urbana, IL. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked on microfluidic-based techniques for controlled angiogenesis with Profs. Paul Kenis and Brendan Harley. Gabrielson has been teaching the polymer and biomaterial labs in the Materials Science and Engineering department since 2013. He enjoys teaching these classes because it allows him to spend the bulk of his time working in the laboratory environment, something that he still finds exciting after spending nearly 20 years in that setting. Outside of the lab, he enjoys spending time with his wife and son.
Associate Professor, Daniel Shoemaker
Professor Daniel P. Shoemaker received his BS with Honors in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois in 2006 and his PhD in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010. His doctoral work focused on using neutron scattering and real-space modeling to understand the structure-property relationships of disordered magnetic and electronic oxides. In 2011, he began a postdoctoral appointment in the Materials Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory where he investigated the synthesis of superconductors and semiconductors with a focus on in situ spectroscopy and x-ray diffraction. Shoemaker joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor in August 2013.
Shoemaker’s accomplishments include a DOE Early Career Award, being named as an Ivan Racheff Scholar, and an affiliation with IQUIST (Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center). In 2015, Shoemaker became part of the DOE EFRC Center for Emergent Superconductivity, focused on developing new materials and synthesis techniques for unconventional superconductivity. In 2017, he was awarded the Illinois NSF MRSEC (Nadya Mason is PI), to investigate new materials for antiferromagnetic spintronics. Shoemaker has published 49 papers to date.
Known for being a dedicated teacher and advisor, Shoemaker has been recognized by the Engineering Council with an Outstanding Advising Award for being a top 10% engineering advisor as nominated by students. In addition, his teaching has been rated as exceptional for MSE 403, Synthesis of Materials, and Outstanding for MSE 405, Microstructure Determination.
Graduate students in the Shoemaker group have received numerous awards: MRS Graduate Student Award (Ankita Bhutani), NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (Shannon Murray), MatSE Intel-Racheff Fellowship (Ankita Bhutani), MatSE Distinguished Research Assistantship (Manohar Karigerasi), PPG-MRL Graduate Student Assistantship (Chengxi Zhao).
Associate Professor, André Schleife
André Schleife, Blue Waters Assistant Professor, obtained his Diploma and Ph.D. at Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany for theoretical and computational work on transparent conducting oxides. He then worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a description of non-adiabatic electron-ion dynamics. Research in his group revolves around excited electronic states and their real-time dynamics; for this he uses and implements accurate computational methods. The vision of the Schleife group is to use high-performance super computers to translate simple models into quantum-mechanical first-principles predictions to realize the goal of computation-based materials modification or selection for societal benefit, for example in electronics and energy.
The courses Schleife teaches at UIUC include “Electronic Properties of Materials” and “Computational MSE – Microscale/Macroscale,” for which he was on the list of teachers ranked as excellent by their students a total of five times. As part of a Strategic Instructional Innovations Program he worked on these and other courses of the MatSE curriculum to incorporate computation and to use computational techniques for solving materials science problems.
Schleife has received the NSF CAREER award, the ONR YIP award, and is an ACS PRF doctoral new investigator. He is member of the Executive Committee of the Division of Computational Physics of the APS, an editor for a journal, and actively organizes national and international schools, workshops, and tutorials to advance the community around cutting-edge first-principles simulations of materials. He is a Mercator Fellow of the Collaborative Research Centre 1242 on “Non-Equilibrium Dynamics of Condensed Matter in the Time Domain.” To date, he has published 76 papers.
Schleife’s graduate students received various prestigious awards or fellowships, including the Racheff-Intel Award (Cheng-Wei Lee), NCSA Materials and Manufacturing Graduate Student Fellowship (Ethan Shapera), Computational Science and Engineering fellowship (Xiao Zhang), Scholarship to study abroad by the Taiwanese Government (Cheng-Wei Lee), Racheff Teaching Fellowship (Joshua Leveillee), NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (Erick Hernandez), Mavis Future Faculty Fellow (Kisung Kang), and DCMP (Xiao Zhang)/Ovshinsky (Alina Kononov) Travel Awards from the American Physical Society.