Congratulations to Nate Reid, RSSEL’s graduate student awarded First Place for his research poster in “Glow-Discharge Optical Emission Spectroscopy of Neutron-Irradiated Tungsten” among 48 posters presented at Oak Ridge National Laboratory -ORNL. Nate spent his summer at ORNL conducting  research in the Nuclear Engineering Science Laboratory Synthesis (NESLS) program.

Anton Neff successfully defended his thesis titled “Dynamic interactions between energetic D and HE ions on Lithium-Tungsten plasma-facing interfaces” this past fall and was awarded the prestigious U.S. DOE Fusion Energy Sciences Postdoctoral Research Program Fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Congratulations and best of luck to Anton from all RSSEL members!

Professor Allain’s RSSEL group will examine surfaces of fine-grained bodies from asteroids and surrogate materials under simulated radiation exposure conditions created in IGNIS facility to decipher space weathering effects. Prof. Allain will examine lunar samples collected during the U.S. Apollo missions and surrogate minerals such as olivine, as well as samples from an asteroid mission the Japanese conducted in 2007 of the near-earth asteroid Itokawa.

The Planetary Science Institute has been awarded $5.5 million by NASA to be a research node of the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) to advance basic and applied research for lunar and planetary science, and advance human exploration of the solar system. The node, known as the TREX toolbox emphasizes new areas that have not been well-studied. These include probing the properties of fine-grained particles at ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths.

For complete NPRE story follow this link.

Congratulations to Felipe Bedoya for successfully defending his thesis titled “Plasma facing components conditioning techniques and their correlation with plasma performance in NSTX-U” this summer. Felipe has accepted a postdoctoral research position at MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) starting fall 2017. Best of luck to Felipe from all RSSEL members!

Professor Allain will present the invited talk titled Innovating Bioactive Interfaces for Next-Generation Personalized Medical Implant Technology at OTM’s Innovation and Startup Showcase on September 21, 2017 at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

Share the Vision will preview a pipeline of emerging technologies through research & start-up presentations featuring 24 leading innovators and entrepreneurs from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and partner institutions.

This year’s event will focus on technologies at the intersection of engineering and medicine in four areas: Emerging Drug Discoveries; Targeted Bio-Tools & Real Time Diagnostics; Intersection of Informatics & Healthcare; and Body Visualization & Engineering.

RSSEL’s Multi-scale Computational Irradiation Surface Science team was invited to present highlights from their research that leveraged Blue Waters petascale supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Massive-scale atomistic simulations used while developing directed irradiation synthesis of ordered nanodots and other nanostructures are necessary to address knowledge gaps in existing theories of nanopattern formation and growth.

The work completed involved conducting MD simulations of 3 million atoms for nearly 50 million time steps. On a conventional supercomputing cluster this would take multiple years to complete. Production runs on Blue Waters were able to simulate up to 10 million time steps on 128 nodes in just 48 hours, allowing the majority of the production runs to be completed in less than two months actual time. The 2016 Blue Waters report highlights RSSEL’s work on page 96, and complete research results were published in the journal Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. B in April 2017: Massive-scale molecular dynamics of ion-irradiated III–V compound semiconductors at the onset of nanopatterning

Professor Allain has received the 2017 College of Engineering Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research for his work unifying concepts from nanotechnology, nuclear engineering and materials science.

NPRE Department Head Jim Stubbins highlighted Prof. Allain’s research group for its impact forging new fundamental and applied research directions in emergent areas of material surfaces and interfaces exposed to extreme environments, as well as pioneering the use of in-situ and in-operando surface diagnosis and directed irradiation synthesis, complemented with multi-scale modeling developed to support these research themes.

For full NPRE Illinois article follow this link.

Advanced Science News featured the article Magnetic Healing of Brain Injury by Professor Allain’s group highlighting the magnetic natural hydrogel MBNC as a novel, multi-functional biomaterial that would provide a focal magnetic attractive force at the local region near the aneurysm neck orifice.  The RSSEL group recently published on this new alternative method of using scaffold stents to create a local and focal attraction force of cells for an in situ reconstruction of the tunica media in the article titled Bacterial Nanocellulose Magnetically Functionalized for Neuro-Endovascular Treatment in the journal of Macromolecular Bioscience.