The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship supports outstanding doctoral students who are actively working on dissertation research and writing. It seeks to support students working on dissertations that are unusually creative, ambitious and impactful.

Peter’s research thrust is to find new materials and design devices that can mitigate heating from electronics, saving a tremendous amount of energy in the long run. To this end, his research explores the frontiers of materials synthesis to engineer new, sustainable, non-volatile devices with unprecedented performance. His research centers around discovering new ferroic states in disorder-driven materials. This includes synthesis and characterization of new, magnetic, entropy-stabilized oxides and device implementation and optimization of existing composite multiferroic systems. Through these projects he has experience with many aspects of materials design, ranging from material deposition and basic characterization to nanolithography and coupled electronic measurements.

See the press release here: https://mse.engin.umich.edu/about/news/three-mse-students-win-rackham-predoctoral-awards

Peter was invited to give a talk at and won the gold award at the annual Univ. of Michigan Materials Research Symposium put on by the MSE department.

Peter’s talk was titled Epitaxially Engineered, Enhanced Magnetostriction in a Strain-Driven Composite Multiferroic.

The award comes from the Ceramics program within the NSF Division of Materials Research. The project is to focus on the understanding the roles of defects and disorder on the dielectric properties of entropy-stabilized thin film materials.

Established in 2017 to honor 100 years of one of the University’s oldest and most prestigious scholarships, the Barbour Centennial Award helps graduate student research via financial support for travel, resources, and living expenses. Barbour Scholar alumnae from across the globe came together to contribute to this gift.