Brandon Bocklund Promoted!

After completing his postdoctoral work, Brandon Bocklund has been promoted to Research Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Materials Science Division. He continues to work on advancing tools for materials design along with tools for uncertainty quantification and propagation in Calphad modeling.

Richard Otis + Proteus Space

Richard Otis has joined California startup Proteus Space, Inc., as its Principal Computational Engineer. In this role he is leading a team of engineers building digital twin engineering technologies for spacecraft. Separately, Richard is continuing in his role as co-lead for the PyCalphad software project and section editor for the Calphad journal.

Cole Britt successfully defended his PhD Thesis!

Heartfelt congratulations, Cole, on your successful PhD thesis defense! Your achievement is a testament to your perseverance and expertise. Here’s to your continued success!

Adam received a travel award!

Adam Krajewski will attend the OPTIMADE Meeting and CIMTEC 2024 Conference in Montecatini Terme, Italy with the full cost of the trip reimbursed.

Ricardo Amaral: EME Fuel Science Graduate Award winner!

Congratulations to Ricardo for receiving the 2024 Frank J. Vastola And Ruth J. St. Clair Vastola Graduate Scholarship. Consideration for this award is given to outstanding graduate students enrolled in the Energy and Mineral Engineering (EME) Graduate Program whose research utilizes computational methods in energy or fuel conversion.

Adam Successfully defended his PhD thesis

Congratulations Adam! Here’s to your hard work and future endeavors.

I’m certain he would want you to check out his github: https://github.com/amkrajewski

Congratulations to Ricardo on Outstanding TA Award

Congratulations to Ricardo for his achievement of the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Department of Energy and Minerals Engineering at Penn State! It’s great to have students committed to the mission of sharing knowledge with others.

Congratulations to our alumna Melissa Marshall (BS '00) for McFarland Award

Let us congratulate our alumna Melissa Marshall (BS 2000) on receiving 2024 David Ford McFarland Award Lecture for Achievement in Metallurgy for her extraordinary achievements in the industrial side of our field. She is currently vice president at Westinghouse, accountable for the global internal audit, enterprise risk management, and global financial controls programs.

You can read more about her story in this Penn State news article.

Group Sushi Friendsgiving

Today, in the spirit of Friendsgiving, we had a nice sushi lunch at Tadashi - a nearby place beloved by many of our members and alumni!