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About Widely recognized as one of the top five materials research facilities in the world, The Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) serves as the innovation engine for discoveries in new materials. The facility is home to a scientific and engineering community that creates new collective knowledge and fosters the next generation of scientific leaders. By enabling modern technological advances, the high-impact research conducted at the MRL and its affiliated centers has enormous societal impact, and is shaping the future of technology, the environment, and medicine. The Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was established in September 1992 with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and became an NSF Materials Research Science & Engineering Center (MRSEC) in 1996. The MRL is supported by the MRSEC Program of the NSF under Award No. DMR-1121053. Click here to view our 2010-11 Annual Report. Resources For: Teachers Undergraduates K-12 Students Giving to the MRL

News We are delighted to announce that MRL Director Craig Hawker has been awarded the 2012 Centenary Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The Centenary prize was founded in 1947 to commemorate the centenary of the Chemical Society's founding in 1841, and is awarded to outstanding international chemists, who are also exceptional communicators. The award honors Craig for his outstanding creative development of new strategies for the design of novel polymers which has revolutionized the field of polymer synthesis and influenced a generation of chemists. We are also delighted to share the information that former MRL Director, and Emeritus Professor Tony Cheetham has been awarded the 2012 Nyholm Prize for Inorganic Chemistry, also from the Royal Society of Chemistry, for his contributions to the structural characterization of new and useful mixed metal oxide and framework materials. The MRL and Dow Materials Institute are proud to partner with the Technology Management Program at UCSB in support of the 2012 New Venture Competition. The 2012 competition was the biggest yet and we are thrilled to announce that James Rogers (PhD student in the Materials Department and MRL) together with Zubin Kuvidia (PhD student in Chemical Engineering) were awarded both the NVC's Grand Prize and Best Tech Push Award for their start-up aPEEL Technology. Selected from 140 competitors on 46 teams that started the competition, we look forward to James and Zubin joining past winners in creating successful Santa Barbara-based companies. The MRL wishes to congratulate Jason Kawasaki, Seung Soo Oh, and Neil Treat on their recent awards at the Materials Research Society's Spring Meeting. Jason Kawasaki of the Palmstrom group was presented with a GOLD award. Seung Soo Oh of the Soh group and Neil Treat of the Chabinyc and Hawker groups were presented with SILVER awards. Congratulations! MRL REU students Lucy Darago and Katelyn Cahill-Thompson are recipients of 2012 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Lucy (UCSB CCS Chemistry 2012) has participated in the RISE and CISEI programs and currently does undergraduate research in Ram Seshadri's group. Katelyn (UC Davis, Biomedical Engineering 2010) completed a RISE internship in the Safinya group in 2008 and a CISEI internship to Trinity College Dublin in 2009 and is currently a graduate student at Stanford in bioengineering. Congratulations also to Stephanie Moffitt (UCSB Chemistry 2012) and Charlotte Osborne (Willamette University, Chemistry 2011) who received NSF GRF Honorable Mentions. The MRL and the Center for Scientific Computing are pleased to announce the Southern California Simulations in Science Conference to be held April 16. Speakers from industry will talk about how they use simulations and high performance computing in their research and a lunchtime poster session will feature UCSB HPC research. For information and registration, please click here. James Rogers has won the Frank J. Padden award of the Division of Polymer Physics of the American Physical Society. Out of 28 nominations he was selected as one of 7 PhD candidate finalists whose oral presentations were judged by a committee of senior physicists in the Division. His paper "Imaging three dimensional bicontinuous networks in bulk heterojunction solar cells" was selected as the best of an excellent set of presentations. MRL undergraduate interns Christina Rodriguez (Hawker group, mentored by Nate Lynd) and Maia Kinnebrew (Han group, mentored by Sunyia Hussain) have won Special Merit Awards for their research presentations at the California Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP) Statewide Symposium in Irvine, CA. CAMP provides research and program support for University of California undergraduate students in science, engineering and math fields. The CAMP Statewide Symposium brings together over 100 undergraduate researchers from the nine UC campuses. Researchers in the Computational Materials Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have uncovered the fundamental limits on optical transparency in the class of materials known as transparent conducting oxides. Their discovery will support development of energy efficiency improvements for devices that depend on optoelectronic technology, such as light- emitting diodes and solar cells. More... The Dow Chemical Company has awarded UC Santa Barbara up to $15 million to establish a collaborative research initiative that will help shape the future of technology in areas that will benefit society. The Dow Materials Institute at UCSB will educate future scientists and engineers and advance the discovery of revolutionary new materials with applications that range from novel polymers to next-generation microelectronics. More... The MRL is pleased to announce that Song-i Han has been awarded a 2011 NIH Director's New Innovator Award. These very prestigious and highly sought after awards are designed to support exceptionally creative investigators and highly innovative projects that have the potential for unusually high impact. Song-i will receive $1.5 million dollars to support her research. MROP 2012 & CFDC Meeting Dates Announced: The Materials Research Outreach Program Symposium 2012 (MROP 2012) will take place on January 31 & February 1, 2012 in the UCSB Corwin Pavilion. The Annual Meeting of the Complex Fluids Design Consortium (CFDC) will be held on the preceding Monday, January 30th in the Room 2053. Further details on both meetings can be found here. Recent UCSB graduate, Daniel P. Shoemaker, a postdoctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory, is the winner of the 23rd Rosen Prize. The prize, established in honor of Louis Rosen, the father of Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE), is awarded for the most outstanding doctoral or master's thesis based on experimental or theoretical research performed at LANSCE. Criteria include the originality and scientific impact of the research and the student's contribution to the research. Ram Seshadri, Dotti Pak and Julie Standish have been awarded a UCSB Faculty Outreach Grant to develop curriculum materials for the MRL's Solar Car Workshop. The workshop links UCSB's research strength in photovoltaics with eighth and ninth grade science and math standards through hands-on building of a solar car kit. The Technology Management Program and the MRL are proud to acknowledge the 2011 New Venture Competition Finalists - Athlete Performance Data Systems, WageCraft, Aptitude Medical Systems, SyncIn, GigaMesh, and DermaTex - the final presentation round is May 11 at 3 PM in Corwin Pavillion, everyone is welcome. MRL faculty members Gary Leal and Glenn Fredrickson have been elected as Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research. Moureen Kemei, a first-year Materials Department Graduate Student in Ram Seshadri's group, was selected as a Schlumberger Foundation Fellow. The fellowship is endowed by the Faculty of the Future Program which funds graduate study throughout the world. The MRL is honored to have a Schlumberger Foundation Fellow here at UCSB and provide recognition of Moureen's outstanding work. Faculty for the Future is the flagship program of the Schlumberger Foundation. The program, now in its seventh year, is devoted to bringing about long-term social advancement through the empowerment of women by generating conditions that result in more women pursuing scientific disciplines. The community has grown to become a close-knit group of 194 pioneering women from 54 countries. More.....