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Professor Paul V. Braun

Professor Braun received his BS degree, with distinction, from Cornell University, and his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from UIUC in 1998. Following a one year post-doctoral appointment at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, he joined the faculty at UIUC in 1999 as an assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and a part-time faculty member of the Beckman Institute. He is the recipient of a Beckman Young Investigator Award (2001); 3M Nontenured Faculty Award (2001); Robert Lansing Hardy Award from TMS (2002), and Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2010). From the UIUC College of Engineering, he has received the Willett Faculty Scholar Award (2002), Xerox Award for Faculty Research (2004), and Stanley H. Pierce Faculty Award (2010). He was named a University Scholar by the University of Illinois (2006).

Professor David Cahill

Professor Cahill received his BS in engineering physics from Ohio State University (summa cum laude) and his PhD in physics from Cornell University in 1989. His PhD work concerned lattice vibrations of disordered solids. Before joining the faculty at UIUC, he worked at IBM Watson Research Center where he conducted research on metal-semiconductor interfaces. His current research program focuses on developing a microscopic understanding of thermal transport at the nanoscale; the development of new methods of materials processing and analysis using ultrafast optical techniques; and advancing fundamental understanding of interfaces between materials and water.

Professor Andrew Fergueson

Professor Andrew Ferguson received an M.Eng. with first class honors in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London in 2005, and a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Princeton University in 2010. His doctoral work focused on the application and development of techniques for the nonlinear embedding of biomolecular simulation trajectories to systematically identify the fundamental dynamical motions, folding pathways, and role of solvent interaction. In 2010 he assumed a post-doctoral research position at MIT as a Ragon Fellow, where he applied statistical mechanical tools to develop data-driven models of HIV viral fitness landscapes. Andrew joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 2012.

Professor Waltraud Kriven

Waltraud M. Kriven received a PhD in 1976 in Physical and Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Adelaide in South Australia. The B.Sc. (Hons) and Baccalaureate degrees were in Physical and Inorganic Chemistry and Biochemistry, also from Adelaide University. Dr. Kriven spent one year as a Post Doctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in the Chemistry Dept. at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She then spent three years (1977-1980) jointly at the University of California at Berkeley, and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. There, Dr. Kriven conducted post-doctoral research in transmission electron microscopy of ceramics and was a Lecturer, teaching Phase Equilibria in the senior undergraduate Ceramics Program of the Dept. of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering. For almost four years (1980-1983) Dr. Kriven was a Visiting Scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute in Stuttgart, Germany. There she studied the mechanism of transformation toughening of composite zirconia-based ceramics by 1 MeV HVEM, while working in the electron microscopy group headed by Dr. M. Rühle. Since Feb 1984, Professor Kriven has been at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a Full Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, an Affiliate Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering, and an Affiliate Professor of Bioengineering.

Professor Cecilia Leal

Professor Cecília Leal received a M.S. degree in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Coimbra, Portugal in 2000 and a Ph. D. in Physical Chemistry at the University of Lund, Sweden in 2006 under the supervision of Professor Håkan Wennerström. From 2006 to 2007, she was a researcher at the Norwegian Radium Hospital and a pharmaceutical company, Epitarget AS. In 2007, Cecília joined the laboratory of Professor Cyrus Safinya in the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Vetenskaprådet postdoctoral fellow to investigate the structures and interactions of lipid-nucleic acid self-assembled constructs intended for cellular therapies. Cecília joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 2012.

Professor Lane Martin

Professor Lane W. Martin received his B. S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Dec. 2003. From there he went on to receive his M.S. (May 2006) and Ph.D. (March 2008) in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Following his Ph.D., Lane served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Quantum Materials Program, Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from March 2008 - July 2009. Lane joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor in August 2009.

Professor Angus Rockett

Angus Rockett received a B.S. in Physics from Brown University in 1980 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1986. Dr. Rockett is a Professor of Materials Science at the University of Illinois. His research interests include sputter deposition and characterization of CuInSe 2 for photovoltaics; growth of thin films; microchemical and microstructural analysis of thin films including by TEM, XPS, SIMS, and other methods; modeling of materials, especially semiconductors, using Monte Carlo, density functional theory, and continuum methods; and microelectromechanical systems. Dr. Rockett has more than 115 publications on these topics as well as on dopant segregation during crystal growth, ion source design, and transition metal oxide and nitride deposition and characterization. He has presented more than 40 invited talks.