Materials Science & Engineering

The Department of Materials Science and Engineering had plenty to celebrate at Drexel Engineering's Celebration of Engineering!

🏆 Senior Design Championship Competition (2nd Place)
Alessandra Cabrera, Evelyn Carpenter, and Lucy Plant for Photothermal Desalination for Efficient, Energy-Cheap Freshwater Production

🥇 Senior Design General Competition (1st Place)
Sarah Cassidy, Joe Heston, and Conway Zheng for Poly-L-Lactic Acid Crystalsomes Formed in Environmentally Sustainable Nanoemulsions for Biomedical Applications

MSE students in attendance who received prestigious Drexel Engineering awards, fellowships, and national honors were also recognized at the event:

⭐ Alessandra Cabrera – Fulbright U.S. Student Award & Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award
⭐ Leo Zhang – Outstanding Graduate Student Award
⭐ Carl Furner – Koerner Family Award
⭐ Yash Athreya – Joseph and Shirley Carleone Endowed Fellowship
⭐ Yuanren Liu – Joseph and Shirley Carleone Endowed Fellowship
⭐ Shichen Yu – Paul Lemmo Award

Congratulations to all of our students on an outstanding year of innovation, research, and achievement!

How do you take the last department coffee hour of the spring term up a notch? 🍋☀️ With a lemonade bar, of course!

A special thank you to Prof. Jill Wenderott for organizing our regular coffee hours throughout the year and making our sense of community within the department even stronger. 😊

Cheers to a successful spring term and to the connections we've made along the way! 💛💙

Kudos to Materials Science & Engineering senior Talia Spolansky for returning to her alma mater, Abington High School, to introduce chemistry and physics students to the exciting world of materials science and engineering!

“I was so happy to share some of my knowledge and experiences, and it was such a sentimental and rewarding way to finish up my senior year at Drexel,” said Talia. “Seeing the curiosity and enthusiasm of the students reminded me of why I fell in love with materials engineering. It is such an interdisciplinary field that there's something interesting for everyone and anyone.”

Thank you, Talia, for inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers and for representing Drexel so well. We can't wait to see where your journey takes you next! 🐉🔬✨

Each spring, our senior design teams showcase their hard work and innovation through final presentations, and a team is selected to represent the department at the school-wide Celebration of Engineering senior design department champions competition. We’re thrilled to announce that Alessandra Cabrera, Evelyn Carpenter and Lucy Plant have been chosen for their project, “Photothermal Desalination for Efficient, Energy-Cheap Freshwater Production”
Congratulations to this outstanding team—and to all of our seniors for delivering truly professional, impactful presentations. We couldn’t be prouder!
📅 Join us at the Celebration of Engineering
🕑 June 5 | 2–5 PM
📍 Bossone Lobby & Mitchell Auditorium
Come explore incredible student work across disciplines, including:
• Senior design department champions
• First-year design projects
• Undergraduate research
• Open senior design submissions
Cast your vote for your favorites and help celebrate the creativity and innovation of our engineering students!

International co-op greetings from Braxton Troxel, who is working as a research assistant for the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing, a public research institute in Singapore! At A*STAR Braxton is conducting computational materials research, running DFT calculations and training machine learning interatomic potentials so that researchers can better understand the structures and properties of the amorphous phases of optical phase change materials as well as their crystallization kinetics.

Joining him for the photo are his supervisor Dr. Liu Yun and Valerie Lim, Director for the Global Career Center.

The recently announced Drexel 40 under 40 includes three extremely accomplished young MSE alums: Zikria Saif (BS ’25), Kyle Matthews (PhD ’24) and Steven Spurgeon (PhD ’14). Read all about their amazing achievements in the latest issue of Drexel Magazine https://drexelmagazine.org/story/40-under-40-2026/

Spring and summer mean co op season for Drexel MSE students—and we love hearing where their experiences take them!

For her final co op, fourth year student Olivia Chille is working as a cosmetic formulation chemist at Good Molecules, supporting the development and optimization of skincare products. From formulating and testing prototypes to evaluating ingredient performance and assisting with stability and compatibility studies, Olivia is gaining hands on experience at every stage of product development.

As Olivia shares: “This experience has been giving me hands on exposure to product development and the practical application of chemistry in the cosmetics industry!”
Love to see our students applying their knowledge and skills in exciting, real world settings! 💄🔬

Big news for Drexel Materials! Our program has climbed to #32 globally in the 2025 Shanghai Rankings Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, up from #41 last year—and ranks #13 in the U.S.
Proud of our faculty, students, researchers and staff driving this momentum forward! 🔬✨
Read more about our rise in rankings https://drexel.edu/engineering/news-events/news/archive/2026/April/mse-shanghai-2025/.
Image credit: MAX Dragon, Babak Anasori (PhD ‘14)

Professional development opportunities like conference participation are another form of experiential learning that we support for our students whenever we can! Our department was thrilled to be able to chip in to help students Boran Duman, Yael Passy, Prastuti Upadhyay and Jaxon Weiss attend the TMS 2026 Annual Meeting in San Diego. The students attended workshops, represented Drexel Materials in the Materials Bowl, and connected with the broader materials community.

👏 Special congratulations to Prastuti, who received the Extracting Processing Division Scholarship Award and presented her research in a student poster session!

Congratulations to department head Caroline Schauer for being elected AAAS Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science! AAAS is one of the largest global scientific societies with members in more than 91 countries around the world. It is also a leading publisher of scientific research through its Science family of journals. AAAS Fellowship is recognized as one of the most prestigious distinctions in the scientific community. Read more at https://drexel.edu/engineering/news-events/news/archive/2026/April/schauer-aaas-fellow/