LSU ME Professor Receives CAREER Award

LSU Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Chris Marvel recently received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, which recognizes early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Marvel’s CAREER research involves investigating underlying effects of grain boundary complexion transitions on long-range mass transport in rare-earth doped spinel, and to develop virtual and mixed applications that reinvigorate the materials-related curriculum at LSU and educate K-12 students, their parents, and teachers. 

“I am thrilled to have received the CAREER award,” Marvel said. “It will provide my group resources to strengthen our structural ceramic research effort at LSU with a focus on atomic-scale behaviors, become major users on the atomic-resolution capabilities now being installed in the Shared Instrumentation Facility, and continue to utilize the high performance computing services supported by Louisiana. We are also excited to work with the LSU Chevron Center for Engineering Education to develop and implement K-12 outreach programs to support young students in Baton Rouge.”

Marvel’s work will provide mechanistic insights that can be used to solve issues related to the energy transition in the U.S. Rare-earth and silicon diffusion in spinel is investigated in the U.S., but the research outcomes can be extended to applications related to hydrogen permeation and embrittlement in iron and nickel alloys, intergranular carbon diffusion that leads to metal dusting degradation in steels and superalloys, both of which are chief concerns of industrial partners in Louisiana, and maximize interfacial transport efficiency in next-generation ion batteries.