Layered Solids Group (LSG)

Congratulations to PhD student Babak Anasori! He won the “Teaching Achievement Award”. Undergraduate students and faculty nominate graduate student TAs for the awards, and recipients are determined by a Teaching Excellence Committee based on the nominations, recommendation letters and recipients’ teaching portfolio.

Babak is the first recipient of the Teaching Achievement Award (as a TA) in Drexel University. Teaching Achievement Award is the final award for a TA who has already won Teaching Excellence award and a Continued Teaching Excellence Award in the previous years.

The 2014 awards were presented at the Drexel Graduate Student Day, held on May 30, 2014.

Congratulations to PhD student Michael Naguib! He won the “Gold Award in Materials Research Society (MRS) Graduate Student Awards”.

The awards honor students who excel in research and academic achievements. MRS looks to recognize those students who show particular promise for future excellence in materials science and engineering. Gold awardees received $400 and a presentation plaque and silver awardees received $200 and a certificate of accomplishment. All finalists had their registration fees waived and received a one-year MRS student membership. The awards were presented during an awards ceremony on Wednesday, April 23, 2014.

Congratulations to PhD student Michael Naguib! He has been named a “Eugene P. Wigner Fellow”.

The highly competitive Eugene P. Wigner Fellowship is the most prestigious fellowship at “Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)”. Named for Eugene P. Wigner, Nobel Laureate and first Director of Research and Development at ORNL, the fellowship exists to attract recent Ph.D. graduates to ORNL and encourage these scientists to flourish in their fields while contributing to ORNL and the U.S. Department of Energy’s missions and goals.

Starting in May, Naguib will join the more than 70 Wigner Fellows since its inception in 1975.

As Wigner Fellow, Naguib will be working on understanding the effect of surface termination and electronic structure on the electrochemical properties of two-dimensional transition metal based materials including MXenes, a material that Naguib helped to develop during his Ph.D. at Drexel, and oxides. Based on this understanding, Naguib will identify a design approach to enhance the performance of lithium-ion battery electrodes.

ORNL is the largest DOE laboratory and only selects two to three Wigner Fellows per year. The fellowship lasts for a two-year term, at which point Naguib will have the option of continuing his work at ORNL.

For the second year in a row Ph.D. students Babak Anasori and Michael Naguib received the Roland B. Snow Award from the American Ceramic Society for their work on “The Carbon-Anatase Dog”. This award is presented for the best ceramographic work at the annual meeting of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS) during MS&T and consists of a monetary award and a Steuben glass artifact. Their entry also received the first place in the Scanning Electron Microscopy Category. The SEM image that was captured by Babak shows oxidized Ti₂C₃ particles (Michael’s research). The MS&T conference is taking place October 27-31 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Roland B. Snow Award

“The Carbon-Anatase Dog”
Babak Anasori, Michael Naguib, Yury Gogotsi, Michel W. Barsoum

Prof. Barsoum’s new book entitled “MAX Phases: Properties of Machinable Ternary Carbides and Nitrides” is published.
This is the first comprehensive book on MAX Phases, from both an experimental and a theoretical viewpoint, which covers elastic, electrical, thermal, chemical and mechanical properties in different temperature regimes, concluding with a treatment of MAX phase composites and potential as well as current applications.

By bringing together, in a unified, self-contained manner, all the information on MAX phases hitherto only found scattered in the journal literature, this one-stop resource offers researchers and developers alike an insight into these fascinating materials.

In an article entitled “The weird world of the incredibly small” in the Science News of The Guardian News an image of MXene was featured as one of the 11 images. The image was originally one of the winners in the “Science as Art” competition in the 2012 MRS Fall Meeting.
This image is a combination of 3 different scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of MXene particles. The MXene particles were fabricated by Ph.D. student Michael Naguib.

For the third year in a row PhD students Babak Anasori and Michael Naguib won in International Metallographic Contest (IMC) held by the International Metallographic Society, an affiliate of ASM International! Their poster entitled “Nano titania/carbon sheets hybrid structure by oxidizing 2-D Ti₃C₂” win first place in IMC 2013.

First Place

Class 4: Electron Microscopy Scanning
“Nano titania/carbon sheets hybrid structure by oxidizing 2-D Ti₃C₂”
Babak Anasori, Michael Naguib, Yury Gogotsi and Michel W. Barsoum

Click the image to see Babak’s poster. (PDF file is copyright protected, send an email to request password).

For more information go here.

Congratulations to Prof. Michel Barsoum! He received the OutStanding Research Award from Materials Science and Engineering department in Drexel University.

Congratulation to Ph.D. candidate Michael Naguib! His ACS Nano paper titled “Two-dimensional transition metal carbides” was awarded the ACerS 2013 Ross Coffin Purdy Award. The Purdy award is given to the author or authors who, in the judgment of the committee, made the most valuable contribution to ceramic technical literature during the calendar year prior to the selection. This work has established a new family of two-dimensional transition metal carbides, so-called MXenes, they are electronically conductors and they showed a promising performance as a new electrode material for lithium ion batteries and supercapacitors. This paper was co-authored with Ph.D. candidate Olha Mashtalir (advisor: Yury Gogotsi), B.S. student Joshua Carle, former research professor Volker Presser, and Dr. Jun Lu and Professor Lars Hultman from Linköping University, Prof. Yury Gogotsi and Prof. Michel W. Barsoum.

Recognition of this achievement will be given Monday, October 28, 2013 at the ACerS Honors and Awards Banquet during the Materials Science and Technology Conference (MS&T13) taking place October 27 – 31 in Montréal, Quebec, Canada.

Congratulations to Dr. Nina Lane! She received the Outstanding Promise Doctoral Award in the area of Mathematical Sciences and Engineering. At every Commencement, three awards are presented to graduating doctoral students who are deemed to exhibit great promise in enhancing Drexel’s reputation in the future. The awards, with a cash prize of $1000 and a certificate of recognition each, are in the following categories: Social Sciences; Mathematical Sciences and Engineering; Physical and Life Sciences.