1/9/2015
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MatSE grads demonstrated their skill and creativity at the MRS Fall Meeting in Boston. Thu Doan, Ph.D. student in the Sottos group, won first place in the “Science as Art” contest for her SEM image of electrospun core-shell fibers containing self-healing agents deposited on steel. Andy Long, Ph.D. student in the Ferguson group, placed third in the Materials Hackathon and won the Outstanding Student Presenter Award for Symposium SS (Informatics and Genomics for Materials Development) for his talk "Accelerated Sampling of Self-Assembly Systems Using Machine Learning."
Thu Doan’s winning artwork (below) is related to her research developing new protective coatings for steel using electrospinning, a method where high voltage is used to turn solutions (liquids) into fibers (solids). Doan explained that the fibers have a solid polymer shell that is used to contain a liquid core material. When the material gets damaged, the shell breaks to release the liquid core material which reacts with the liquid from other fibers to fill in cracks from damage. The liquid then hardens into a new solid material to repair scratches in coatings. By repairing these scratches, the coating prevents the underlying material (metals) from corrosion and further damage.
Doan inherited her artistic ability from her parents who were both artists in Vietnam. “They made ivory sculptures and paintings,” Doan said. As an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, Doan majored in chemistry and biology. She also worked at Sandia National Laboratories. “We had a lot of gloveboxes,” Doan explained, “so to easily differentiate them, we named them after comics/cartoons/book characters. I painted Harry Potter, Batman, and Superman on my gloveboxes.”
At the University of Illinois, Doan is working on her Ph.D. and MBA. “I’m learning a lot from both programs, and I’ve met many interesting people,” she said.
The Hackathon at MRS was a perfect fit for Andy Long (pictured below, right). “I have had several ideas kicking around for a while now and this event gave me the opportunity (really the excuse) to dive headfirst into one and see what was possible,” Long said. At the Hackathon, he and his partner, Ioan Magdau from The University of Edinburgh, designed and built a working computer code for materials machine learning in just 24 hours.
Long came to the University of Illinois after receiving his B.S. and M.S. degrees in materials science and engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He said the unique opportunity to work for then-new professor Andy Ferguson on an open-ended problem in the computational design of self-assembly systems weighed heavily in his decision to come to Illinois for graduate study.
“From an early point in my undergraduate career, I realized that computer science has a great deal to offer the field of materials science and I’ve been interested in finding new and unique ways to marry these two disciplines,” Long said. “My research with Andy has perfectly fit that goal, providing me the chance to investigate how we might leverage machine learning techniques to better understand, and ultimately design, systems that undergo self-assembly with an eventual application towards developing design principles for the formation of antimicrobial nanostructures.”
Long plans to pursue an academic career following his Ph.D. and said that working with Prof. Andy Ferguson has given him the added bonus of seeing a new group form from the ground up.
As a side note, MatSE at Illinois took first place in the Hackathon too—Prof. Andre Schleife was on the winning team designing code for 3D mobile phone visualization for crystals.