Qun Huo has been recognized by the Florida High Tech Corridor Council as part of its “Faces of Technology.” She is featured in the Faces of Technology video library, and she will also appear in florida.HIGH.TECH 2012, the Corridor’s annual magazine. To see Qun’s video interview, visit www.facesoftechnology.com. Huo is the founder and president of…

Materials Science and Engineering Ph.D. student Shashank Saraf will receive a coveted poster award from MS&T 2011. He presented his poster at the Prof. J. Narayan Acta Materialia Gold Medal Symposium earlier this year. Speaking and presenting at this event is by invitation only. This particular symposium is also attended by NSF and other funding…

Amit Kumar won an award for Best Poster at the 2011 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting. His poster, entitled “Effect of radiation on Ceria NP surfaces (A NSF funded project),” was presented on Thursday, December 1, 2011. The MRS conference is very prestigious, and Amit’s poster was deemed to be one of the top two…

Current UCF student Rene Diaz is a winner of the National Science Foundation’s 2011 Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) competition. The fellowship will allow Rene to continue his education in engineering with UCF’s Materials Science Engineering graduate program. The NSF wrote that the selection was based on his outstanding abilities and accomplishments as well as…

Testing the effectiveness of new pharmaceuticals may get faster thanks to a new technique incorporating quantum dots developed at the University of Central Florida. Some drug testing can take a decade or more, but UCF associate professor Swadeshmukul  Santra and his team have created an electronic quantum dots (Qdots) probe that “lights up” when a…

Undergraduate student Ashton Lee and her faculty mentor Dr. Swadeshmukul Santra have been awarded UCF’s SMART Grant for spring 2012. Ashton and Dr. Santra will receive $1,000 each to help fund their research. As part of the SMART program, Ashton will participate in Directed Independent Research with Dr. Santra through the Burnett School of Biomedical…

University of Central Florida researchers, for the first time, have used stem cells to grow neuromuscular junctions between human muscle cells and human spinal cord cells, the key connectors used by the brain to communicate and control muscles in the body. The success at UCF is a critical step in developing “human-on-a-chip” systems. The systems…

Reprinted from MaterialViews.com, the leading news portal dedicated to materials science. by Carol Stanier Nanosized features can easily be printed accurately onto an already patterned surface, using a new technique called nanoimprinting by melt processing developed by US scientists. Commercial production of devices based on nanotechnology demands that tiny, complex components be fabricated on a…

University of Central Florida Associate Professor Lei Zhai’s work with “frozen smoke” has earned him a semifinalist spot in an international competition likened to the Nobel Prize. “I am quite surprised by all the attention,” said Zhai, who specializes in nanotechnology. “I don’t know where this competition will go, but I hope we can get…

On August 11, the NanoScience Technology Center and Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center hosted a K-12/Undergraduate/RET 2011 Summer Research Showcase. The event was organized by Professor Aman Behal (EECS & NSTC) and held in the atrium of the Engineering II building. Seventeen posters were on display at the showcase. Abstracts and participants for each…