In This Edition...

MSE Alums Come Together For a Fond Farewell to Dr. Frank Ko

More than 70 Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) faculty, staff, students, and alumni gathered on May 4 at the University Club in MacAlister Hall to celebrate the retirement of Dr. Frank Ko—who joined the department in 1984—as part of Drexel University’s Alumni Weekend.

During the event, guests dined and were entertained by master of ceremonies Dr. Rick Knight, Auxiliary Professor of MSE. Throughout the evening, colleagues, students, friends, and family of Dr. Ko spoke about his contributions to the university, as well as, some of his better-known antics. The evening was a nice blend of fond remembrance and humor on Dr. Ko’s behalf. Please click here for images and further details about the event.

The admission costs gathered from guests for the event will be used to support the A.W. and Dorothy Grosvenor Scholarship and the Michael J. Koczak Scholarship. In addition, alumnus Frank Nowicke, Jr., made a generous donation of $1,000 to the department’s scholarships funds.

If you were unable to attend the celebration, but wish to make a contribution to the Grovesnor or Koczak Scholarships, you may do so securely online at www.drexel.edu/ia/giftsonline.

Please note your desired scholarship allocation in the “Special Instructions” field. For additional information, contact Lydia Kokolskyj at 215.895.2611 or lydia@drexel.edu.

Anne Stevens (’80) Gives $1 Million to CoE to Establish Scholarship and Professorship

Anne L. Stevens (MSE, ’80), President and CEO of Carpenter Technology, Reading, PA, has donated $1 million to Drexel University’s College of Engineering (CoE) for a professorship and four scholarships.

The Anne Stevens Scholarship Program for Young Women was established with a $500,000 gift from Stevens and the Lockheed Martin Corporation Directors Charitable Award Fund. The program will provide a total of four scholarships to female CoE students in the College of Engineering: two for MSE, two for other CoE departments.

Stevens also helped the university to establish the $500,000 Anne Stevens Professorship for Young Women Faculty in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering with a gift from the Lockheed Martin Corporation Directors Charitable Award Fund. Recipients of the Assistant Professorship will hold the position for up to five years, or until they receive tenure.

Anne Stevens is currently the president and CEO of Carpenter Technology. She has also served as the Executive Vice President of Ford Motor Company and Chief Operating Officer, The Americas at Ford. In her role at Ford, she was the first female executive vice president in company history.

Top Ranked MSE Department Students Take Top Awards

If you haven’t heard, The Chronicle of Higher Education has announced that Drexel University’s doctoral program in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) is rated among the top ten MSE programs nationwide. This top ten status is according to the 2005 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, a research initiative partly funded by The State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook and produced by Academic Analytics.

Not surprisingly, our top ranked students have had a busy year packed with the usual class assignments and hours spent researching in the lab. Their efforts have not gone unnoticed. MSE students have been the recipients of more than 20 honors and awards just in the past three months! Please click here to check out the department’s latest news about honors and awards.

MSE Graduate Student Aaron Sakulich Receives Fulbright Scholarship

MSE Ph.D. student Aaron Sakulich (advisor: Dr. Michel Barsoum) has been selected as a Fulbright student grantee to Morocco. Aaron is the first Drexel MSE student to receive a J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship while enrolled as a student in the department.

Beginning in September, Aaron will live in Morocco for approximately one year. He has been accepted into a five-week intensive language training program in Moroccan Arabic and, during his time in Morocco, he will be working at the University Hassan II-Mohammedia near Casablanca. The institution is known to be one of the premier science institutes in the Arab world and is located in the largest city and financial center of the country. While there, he will continue the research he has conducted at Drexel with Professor Michel Barsoum: developing simple, low-cost, natural building materials to help developing countries care for their population.

“Africa has a distinct need for an easy to make, cheap, environmentally friendly alternative to traditional cement,” Aaron says. “While in Morocco, I hope to move from making and testing formulae in a lab environment to accelerated testing and characterization, and finally to field testing the material I develop for use as a building material.”

Graduation Announcement

MSE will graduate 20 students this year. The commencement ceremony will be held on Saturday, June 16 in the Daskalakis Athletic Center. See below for a list of those who will soon be fellow alumni:

• Massimiliano Binci
• Yujia Dong
• Adrian Gurga
• Young Ham
• Bryan Kulesza
• Gus LaBella
• Lemoda Laim
• Benjamin Legum
• Alexander Moseson
• John Murphy
• Pamela Panos
• Dianne Phelan
• David Schlier
• David Steinmetz
• Ryan VanderMuelen
• Jennifer Vondran
• Cristin Yavorsky
• Wenhai Wang

MSE Professor Receives University Research/Scholarship Award

Dr. Michel Barsoum, Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, has received the inaugural Drexel University Research/Scholarship Award for the discovery of the kinking elastic deformation mode, a fully reversible deformation mode which is observed in a wide range of materials including geological materials, ceramic materials, graphite and hexagonal metals. He was recognized for this accomplishment at a formal dinner held on May 30th, 2007, in Behrakis Grand Hall.

The Drexel University Research/Scholarship Award honors outstanding faculty for seminal accomplishments in research, scholarship, and creative works. More specifically, this award recognizes faculty members for specific work that has impacted a field in a way that significantly augmented thinking, understanding, or trends among other practitioners and scholars. The award includes a citation which summarizes the particular accomplishment and $10,000 to be placed in a designated account to further the goals of the work.

Dr. Barsoum and his research group were the first to fabricate and fully characterize an important new class of machinable ternary carbides and nitrides, the so-called MAX phases. Since 1996, Dr. Barsoum and his collaborators have published over 140 refereed papers on these ternary carbides and nitrides alone, including ones in Nature, Science and PRL. More recently, Dr. Barsoum and his collaborators have shown that some of the blocks in the Great Pyramids of Giza were cast of a reconstituted limestone concrete. This work has been widely publicized internationally.