Annual Letter from the Chair

Dear Friends and Visitors,

What a year it has been for Penn’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering! As we close the book on another academic year, this letter captures our most noteworthy personal and collective achievements.

Over the past year MSE at Penn had many accomplishments and numerous reasons to celebrate. Faculty recognitions include Chris Murray being elected to NAE, Russ Composto receiving a scholarly chair, Vivek Shenoy winning the Heilmeier Award from Penn Engineering, and Liang Feng receiving a NSF CAREER grant. Our students also had a string of accomplishments including two new NSF fellowships among our current doctoral students (Mike Boyle and Tim Lee), a strong showing of our masters students for the Penn Engineering awards, and our senior design teams winning 1st and 3rd prize at the Penn Engineering competition. With respect to infrastructure, we saw the installation of two new transmission electron microscopes, funding for a FIB SEM, installation of the Dual-source Environment X-ray Scattering (DEXS) facility, new X-ray scattering lab for instruction featuring a Rigaku MiniFlex, and renovations to the undergraduate lounge and MSE conference room. Programmatically we celebrate an enrollment of 29 in our undergraduate class of 2022, a significant increase in the number of women recruited into our PhD program, a doubling of the number of departmental newsletters, and new events for masters students. We also took the bold step of expanding our graduate group to more fully represent the materials research activities across campus. Finally, we had the inaugural Pope Lecture by Easo George and joyfully celebrated Vasek Vitek’s long and distinguished career at Penn.

This high level of achievement is only possible with exceptional contributions from the MSE faculty, students and staff. I’m grateful for the high level of engagement and achievement of this community over the past year. Stay up-to-date with MSE at Penn by signing up for our bimonthly electronics newsletter.

I wish you a great year!

Sincerely,
Karen I. Winey
MSE Department Chair
TowerBrook Faculty Fellow