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Research Areas

Materials research is inherently collaborative and cross-disciplinary. UK Materials Engineering faculty work with researchers across campus and around the world. No brief list of categories could fully capture our research interests or activities. If you don’t see exactly what you are looking for, just send one of us an email, and we’ll be happy to put you in contact with someone in our program or among our collaborators with expertise in your area of interest!

Polymers and Soft Materials

Metals and Alloys

Materials Characterization

Computational Materials Science and Materials Theory

Electronic Materials and Materials for Energy

Research News

Dibakar Bhattacharyya, Ph.D., is one of this year’s Great Teacher Award recipients. For the UK College of Engineering professor known across campus as "DB," there is nothing more exciting than that “aha!” moment when a student realizes their full potential. Teaching students continues to drive Bhattacharyya, now in his sixth decade at UK.

Faculty Awards

The annual College of Engineering Faculty Awards ceremony was held on April 27 at Malone's Prime and Events. Awards were given in the areas of research, service and graduate studies.

A research team in the College of Engineering is leading the charge on utilizing recycled human hair to help repair bridges and buildings across Kentucky and beyond.

L to R: Bertucci, Dailey and Lycans.

Three engineering students were selected to present their research at the Kentucky State Capitol on March 2. 

The goal of the project is to create a membrane-based downstream purification platform for large-scale continuous biomanufacturing of viral vectors and virus-like particles (VLPs).

A team of University of Kentucky researchers led by College of Engineering Professor Dibakar Bhattacharyya, Ph.D., and his Ph.D. student, Rollie Mills, have developed a medical face mask membrane that can capture and deactivate the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on contact.

Professor I.S. Jawahir (right), conducting cryogenic material processing experiments with Daniel Caudill (left), Mechanical Engineering graduate research assistant. Pete Comparoni | UK Photo.

Under this three-way partnership, UK’s project will receive approximately $23.8 million from the U.S. Department of Defense

Jonathan Pham, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. The award will fund his project "Wetting and dynamics on soft and swollen polymeric surfaces" in the amount of $570,000 over five years. 

Rottmann worked on the paper, titled, "Multiplicity of Dislocation Pathways in a Refractory Multi-Principal Element Alloy," with a team from the University of California at Santa Barbara. 

The Kentucky-West Virginia Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (KY-WV LSAMP), spearheaded by UK, is responsible for the program.

Last summer, materials engineering assistant professor Jonathan Pham received two National Science Foundation grants totaling $525,000. Pham, who joined the UK College of Engineering faculty in 2017, researches soft materials and interfaces and liquid-surface interactions, among other interests. Basically, he explores how solid materials…well, sometimes liquids…depending on the size, of course…well, probably better if he explains it.