Tech Students Garner Top Prizes at Poster Competition

by George Zamora

SOCORRO, N.M., October 22, 2001 -- New Mexico Tech materials engineering students garnered three of the top prizes at a research poster competition held recently in conjunction with the 13th Annual Rio Grande Regional Symposium on Advanced Materials in Albuquerque.

New Mexico Tech graduate student Mohammed Islam won first place in the graduate division for his poster titled "Catalytic CVD of Carbon Nanotubes on Silicon (III) Substrates: Random Versus Aligned Growth." Islam received a $200 check as part of his prize.

Tech grad student Melissa Collins earned a third-place finish with her poster, "Full Wafer Encapsulation of Surface Micromachines with Self-Assembled Monolayer Coatings," and received $50 for her efforts.

Nicholas Wolf, an undergraduate student at Tech, presented "Effects of Interface Chemistry on Epoxy-Glass Mode I Toughness" in the undergraduate poster competition and placed first in his division, also earning $200 as part of his award.

Other poster presentations made by Tech students included: "A Self-Consistent-Field Treatment of Excluded Volume Tethered Chains" by Y. Ye; "Extrusion of Porous Alumina and Lead Zirconate Titanate" by Michael K. Niehaus; "Characterization and Processing of Polymer Nanocomposites" by J. K. Rameshwaram; and "Processing of Liga-Derived Components" by Camden Mullen.

The poster competition included nearly 50 presentations made by students representing New Mexico Tech, the University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Texas at El Paso.

Oral presentations also were given at the symposium by Tech graduate students Mary Sandstrom ("The Effect of La Substitution on the Texturing of Bismuth Titanate Sol-Gel Films") and Lee Benysek ("Preferred Orientation in Bismuth Titanate and Bismuth Titanium Niobate, Sol-Gel Derived Thin Films with the Addition of a Photosensitive Chemical").

Several New Mexico Tech faculty members also made oral presentations, including T. David Burleigh, Bhasker Majumdar, and Deidre Hirshfeld of the Tech materials engineering department, and Christa Hockensmith of the Tech chemistry department.

The Rio Grande Regional Symposia on Advanced Materials are technical meetings which are sponsored each year by the New Mexico Section of the American Ceramic Society, the New Mexico Section of the Materials Research Society, and the Albuquerque Section of ASM International. The popular series of meetings and presentations are often used by materials researchers and students throughout the Rio Grande geographic area as "warm-ups" for presentations to be made at other national conferences.