NanoScience Technology Center

UCF NanoScience Technology Center Researchers Recognized for Cutting-Edge Work

By: Robert Wells

UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center professors and students cleaned up in awards this year thanks to their expertise and high-impact research.

The center has six faculty members who were recognized last year as part of the top 2 percent of World Scientists, as ranked by Stanford University. These researchers are Sudipta Seal, Lei Zhai, Qun Huo, Swadeshmukul Santra, Michael Leuenberger and Saiful Khondaker.

Seal is a Pegasus Professor and Chair of UCF’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Zhai is a professor in UCF’s Department of Chemistry and the center’s director. Huo is a professor and graduate program coordinator and Santra is a professor, both in UCF’s Department of Chemistry. Leuenberger and Khondaker are professors in UCF’s Department of Physics.

Some of the other major recognitions center researchers received include:

James Hickman, a professor in UCF’s Department of Chemistry, was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors.

Sudipta Seal was elevated into Fellow status in the American Ceramic Society and was inducted into the Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine of Florida.

Ellen Kang, an assistant professor in UCF’s Department of Physics, received the NSF CAREER award.

The National Science Foundation selected the center as a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site for Engineering and Nanoscience of Materials and Device Applications in Biotechnology and Medicine. This was awarded to Andre Gesquiere, a professor in UCF’s Department of Chemistry, and Sudipta Seal. The start date is May 2021.

Also of note is that the Master of Science in Nanotechnology program has graduated 65 students and currently has 30 students in the program. More than 50 percent of current students are minority students.

“We will expand the nanotechnology master’s program through active recruiting and offer online master’s degrees,” Zhai says. “A new mentoring program will be developed to assign a faculty member to each master’s student to provide research, academic and career guidance.”

The students working at the center also received many prestigious awards, including:

A UCF nanotechnology team led by David Fox, a doctoral candidate in chemistry, was selected by NASA as one of seven university groups from around the country tasked with developing ways to stop the negative effects of moon dust during lunar missions.

Yuen Yee Li Sip, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering, was awarded a three-year fellowship from NASA to support her research project on improving the durability of metals in space.

Elizabeth Barrios, a graduate of UCF’s materials science and engineering doctoral program, was presented with the Luigi G. Napolitano Award by the Space Education and Outreach Committee of the International Astronautical Federation for her work studying materials that can use heat to produce electricity to keep deep-space exploration vehicles, like rovers and probes, working for long periods of time.

Bryan Demosthene, a nanoscience master’s student, recently won a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship and will continue his doctoral study in biomedical sciences at UCF.

Elizabeth Coln, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering, received the Daniel D. Hammond Engineering Endowed Scholarship and CECS Alumni Scholarship Endowment.

A new mentoring program will be developed to assign a faculty member to each master’s student to provide research, academic and career guidance.

Alireza Safaei, a graduate of the Department of Physics, received the Best Dissertation Award from the College of Sciences and UCF.

Discoveries by the center’s researchers have also been documented in top publications over the past year including Science Advances and Nature Communications.

“NSTC is a multidisciplinary research center that performs cuttingedge research in materials and nanotechnology, provides high-quality training for students, and facilitates the advance of innovations to solve real-world technology challenges,” Zhai says. “Our faculty members and students have excelled in nanotechnology research.”

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