MSE Department Holds 40th Annual Hilliard Symposium

On May 18, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern Engineering held the 40th Annual John E. Hilliard Lecture and Symposium. Organized by Professor Derk Joester, the event opened with remarks from Professor Mark Hersam about Hilliard’s impact during his time at Northwestern.

The festivities continued with the annual Materials Science and Engineering Awards Banquet, where Grace Jinliu Wang (PhD ’01) received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award, and Jin Suntivich (’06) accepted the Early Career Achievement Award. Wang began as Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s 17th president on April 3. Suntivich is an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University. 

The symposium’s keynote address was delivered by Kelsey Stoerzinger (’10), assistant professor in the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University. Stoerzinger gave the talk “Working at the Interface: Navigating Junctions within Materials and Disciplines,” which stressed the importance of how researchers describe themselves and their work. She shared how her career and her lab’s research in electrocatalysis has benefited from embracing intersectionality between academic disciplines, classes of materials, scientific approaches, and institutions.

Along with Stoerzinger, 15 graduate students delivered presentations. They were:

• Lindsay Chaney: “High-Temperature Microsupercapacitor Arrays Enabled by Printable Ionogel Electrolytes”
• YuLing Chen: “Deep Eutectic Solvents as Environmentally Friendly Solvents for Processing of Starch Polymers
• Simon Egner: “Nucleic Acid Delivery via Length-Controlled RNA-binding Peptide Amphiphile Nanofibers”
• Jerren Grimes: “Enhancement of Ni-YSZ Fuel Electrode Performance Via Pressurization and GDC Infiltration”
• Christopher Hareland: “A CALPHAD Model of Non-equilibrium Dendritic Growth for the Additive Manufacturing of Industrial Alloys”
• Lidia Kuo: “Sterilizable and Sustainable UV-Resistant Graphene– Polyurethane Elastomer Composites”
• Ruth Lee: “Hierarchical Assembly of Peptide Amphiphiles Enhances BMP2 Delivery”
• Hector Manual Lopez de la Cerda Rios: “The Mechanics and Training of Nanoparticle Magnetoelastic Sheets”
• Kathleen Mullin: “Phase Field Modeling of Localized Thermal Oxidation of Monolayer WS2”
• Roger Reinertsen: “Ion-Mediated Assembly of DNA-Functionalized Nanoparticles in Concentrated Electrolytes”
• Anthony Silvaroli: “Structure-Property Relationships and Design of Hybrid Silicone Elastomers”
• Phil Staublin: “An Orientation-field Model for Grain Growth in Cubic Systems”
• Michael Toriyama: “Topological Insulators for Thermoelectric Applications”
• Carlos Torres: “Material and Interface Engineering in Superconducting Quantum Circuits”
• Caroline Wahl: “High-throughput Materials Discovery with Nanoparticle Megalibraries”

Chaney, Toriyama, and Reinertsen received first-, second-, and third-place awards, respectively. The winners were recognized at the banquet.