Xing Huang's artwork chosen as finalist: The Materials Research Society hosts a Science as Art competition at each MRS Spring and Fall meeting. Using scanning electron microscopy images he took as a Master's student Xing Huang, a graduate student in Prof. Beck's group, prepared this image. The image has been selected as a finalist and will be displayed for voting at the 2011 Spring MRS meeting in San Francisco. Stop by the 2nd level of the Moscone West Convention Center on Tuesday or Wednesday, April 26th or 27th to vote for Xing's artwork! Click here for a full size version of Xing's image (JPG, 2.9 MB).

Xing Huang presents at Spring MRS: Prof. Beck and Xing Huang will be attending the 2011 MRS Spring meeting in San Francisco April 26-29th. Xing will present his work on "Structure of Ultra-small Ceria Nanoparticles from First Principles" on Thursday, April 28th. For more information on this work, please email Prof. Beck or Xing!

UK Announces New Supercomputer: Professor Beck helped announce the University of Kentucky's new supercomputer at a press conference on Sept. 20th. The William N. Lipscomb, Jr. Supercomputing Cluster is the 162nd most powerful supercomputer in the world, and is being used by Prof. Beck and his group to address a range of Materials Engineering problems. The Lipscomb cluster shares many hardware details with the Beck Group's own Abacus cluster, and will be an exciting tool for the group! To see some of Prof. Beck's comments on the new Supercomputer, or details about the cluster, check out UKNow's press release.

New Group Compute Engine: PSSC Labs of California has shipped the Beck Group's new compute engine! The Beowulf cluster, to be named Abacus, offers 192 compute cores using Intel's 6-core Westmere processor. The cluster is home to 4.5 TB of hot-swappable RAID storage, and 384 GB of 1066 MHz RAM. Infiniband QDR interconnects provide high speed network links between nodes. PSSC Labs award-winning CBeST cluster management toolkit will allow easy cluster operation. In combination with UK's new supercomputer (>4000 Westmere cores), Abacus will provide powerful and highly flexible computational resources for the Beck group's research!

Welcome!: Yuan Lu joined the Beck Group as a first-year graduate student in MSE in August 2010. Yuan joins the Beck group after completing her Bachelor's degree at USTC in Hefei, China.

Welcome!: Daniele Scopece, a graduate student in Materials Science at the University of Milano-Bicocca, will visit the Beck Group during the Spring and summer to study strain-dependent surface energies and structures in the Ge on Si heteroepitaxial system. Check out the Research page for more info on this topic!

UK CoE 2010 Engineers Day: Annually the entire UK CoE community hosts a day of demonstrations, contests, games and more to introduce anyone interested to the engineering profession, and the engineering departments and programs at UK. Engineers Day 2010 was Saturday, February 20th, 2010.

2009 Fall MRS Meeting: Prof. Beck presented results of 1000-atom first-principles calculations of low-energy ion bombardment of crytalline Si. These results show that low-energy ion bombardment generates different distributions of deposited kinetic energy than those arising from high-energy bombardments. The distribution of deposited energy is an important input to models of ion beam induced pattern formation on solid surfaces. See more information on related work on the Research page.

NSREC in Quebec City: Prof. Beck presented new results on "The Role of Atomic Displacement Effects in Ion-Induced Dielectric Rupture" at the Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference (NSREC) in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada on July 21st, 2009. Learn more on the Research page.

Transition to UK: On July 1st, 2009, Prof. Beck joined the Chemical & Materials Engineering department at the University of Kentucky. He was previously with the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt University. To learn more about Prof. Beck, visit the People page. To learn more about new and ongoing projects in Prof. Beck's Compuataional Materials Science research group please visit the Research page. If you are interested open positions for undergraduate, graduate, or post-graduate projects in the CMS research group, see the Positions page.