October 2025
Doruk’s paper was published in Materials Characterization! The article is titled “Human Perception-Inspired Grain Segmentation Refinement Using Conditional Random Fields.”
Will presents an invited talk at The Materials for Sustainable Development Conference (MATSUS Fall 25) will be held in Valencia, Spain from the 20th to the 24th October 2025.
July 2025
The lab was awarded a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems (CBET). The project, titled “Collaborative Research: Elucidating cycling and deactivation mechanisms of earth-abundant CO2 looping sorbents under precise temperature control” is a collaboration with
Pratik Dholabhai of the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Will was promoted to Associate Professor!
June 2025
Marquez successfully advanced to PhD Candidacy, congratulations!
March 2025
Will presents an invited talk at the TMS 2025 Annual Meeting & Exhibition March 23–27, 2025, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
July 2024
Huiming presents a talk at Microscopy & Microanalysis in Cleveland, Ohio, July 28-August 1, 2024.
Will presents a talk at the 24th International Conference on Solid State Ionics in London, England, July 15-19, 2024.
June 2024
Will presents a talk at Enhanced Data Generated by Electrons (EDGE) 2024, the 9th International Workshop on Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy and Related Techniques in Vancouver, Canada, June 9-14, 2024.
May 2024
Hasti Vahidi defended her PhD dissertation! Congratulations Dr. Vahidi!
April 2024
Huiming Guo was awarded a 2024 Microscopy & Microanalysis (M&M) Student Scholar Award, for her paper entitled: “Atomic Structure and Chemistry of High-Entropy Oxide Grain Boundaries revealed by STEM Imaging, Strain Mapping, and Spectroscopy”. The award is sponsored by the Microanalysis Society (MAS), which includes complimentary student registration for the M&M 2024 meeting and financial support of expenses to attend the meeting. Huiming will receive her award during the opening plenary session at the M&M 2024 meeting. She will be also invited to the Presidents’ Reception, hosted by the Microscopy Society of America and MAS presidents. Congratulations to Huiming!
Jane’s paper was published in Advanced Materials Interfaces! The article is titled “Precision Calcination Mechanism of CaCO3 to High-Porosity Nanoscale CaO CO2 Sorbent Revealed by Direct In Situ Observations.”
February 2024
Jane Martinez was awarded the Spring 2024 Miguel Velez Scholarship!
Hasti’s paper was published in Advanced Functional Materials! The article is titled “Reversible Enhancement of Electronic Conduction caused by Phase Transformation and Interfacial Segregation in an Entropy Stabilized Oxide.”
January 2024
Jane led the organization of Vista Middle and High School Visit to UCI. The visit included 3 UCI MSE Professors (Bowman, Ragan and Apelian), 7 UCI PhD/Masters students, 53 visiting students, and 5 chaperones.
Huiming’s paper was published in Matter! The article is titled “Designing nanostructure exsolution-self-assembly in a complex concentrated oxide.”
October 2023
Will and Hasti present talks and posters at the 244th Electrochemical Society Meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden. Will presents on behalf of Jenna, Huiming, and Jason.
Will presents an invited talk at the Materials Science & Technology (MS&T) technical meeting and exhibition in Coumbus, OH. Will presents on behalf of Xin, Jenna, Huiming, Hasti, and Komal.
September 2023
Jenna and Will present talks at the 20th International Microscopy Congress (IMC) in Busan, Korea. Jenna was selected to attend the IFSM Young Scientist Assembly at the meeting. Will presents talks and posters on behalf of Huiming and Jane.
August 2023
Dr. Xin Wang began an Assistant Professorship at The University of Alabama’s Metallurgical and Materials Engineering. Congratulations!
Will was featured in Matter’s “35+1 challenges in materials science being tackled by PIs under 35(ish) in 2023” https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2023.06.046
July 2023
Huiming presents at Microscopy and Microanalysis (M&M) in Minneapolis, MN.
June 2023
Xin’s collaborative paper was published in Matter! The article is titled “Compositionally Complex Perovskite Oxides: Exploiting a New Class of Solid Electrolytes with Grain Boundary Enabled Conductivity Improvements.”
May 2023
Jane presents a poster at the Gordon Research Conference on Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage in Les Diablerets, VD, Switzerland.
Jane Martinez was awarded the Fall 2023 CSU Chancelor’s Doctoral Incentive Program (CDIP) Travel Grant.
April 2023
Dr. Xin Wang was awarded best oral presentation of the symposium on high entropy materials at the last MRS spring meeting for her the presentation on dislocation-mediated deformation in a HEO.
February 2023
The Lab received a grant from the ClimateWorks Foundation to collaborate with Prof. Jose Mendoza, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Michigan State University, and Prof. Hang Ren, Chemistry, University of Texas at Austin. Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and ClimateWorks Foundation have made awards to seven cross-disciplinary teams of early career scientists in the third year of the Scialog: Negative Emissions Science initiative, which aims to catalyze advances in basic science that will enable technologies for removal of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to become more efficient, affordable, and scalable.
January 2023
Jason’s paper was published by ACS Applied Nano Materials! The article is titled “Nanoscale Iron Redistribution During Thermochemical Decomposition of CaTi1-xFexO3-δ Alters the Electrical Transport Pathway: Implications for Oxygen-Transport Membranes, Electrocatalysis, and Photocatalysis.”
December 2022
Will was awarded the 2022-2023 Inclusive Excellence Spirit Award! The award establishes the MSE@UCI Early Career Distinguished Seminar Series. The proposal was titled “Strengthening the Engineering Faculty Pipeline: A Curated Materials Science and Engineering Seminar Series for Prospective Faculty Applicants.”
October 2022
Xin’s paper was published by Materials Research Letters! The article is titled “High entropy oxide (Co,Cu,Mg,Ni,Zn)O exhibits grain size dependent room temperature deformation.”
August 2022
Will is giving an invited talk at the Gordon Research Conference on Solid State Studies in Ceramics, in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
July 2022
Marquez gave a lab tour to 30 high school students. The event was organized by the Council of African American Parents, a community-based organization that works with families to demystify the college admissions process, provide direction to the students and parents, and expose them to life as college students. The students had a brief residential experience at UCI, and spent part of their time touring our in lab.
Huiming, Jenna, and Will are presenting at Microscopy and Microanalysis in Portland, Oregon.
Will is giving an invited talk at Solid State Ionics 23 in Boston, Massachusetts.
June 2022
Jenna’s collaborative paper was published by Nano Letters! The study, led by researchers at MIT, is described in an article titled “Exsolution-Driven Surface Transformation in the Host Oxide.”
April 2022
Huiming’s paper presentation video is posted. https://youtu.be/opN88i7Ko5E
March 2022
Will is giving an invited talk at the California State University Long Beach Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry seminar series.
February 2022
Hasti, Jenna, Xin, Huiming, Jason, and Bin are presenting at TMS 2022 Annual Meeting & Exhibition in Anaheim, California, USA. TMS 2022 is February 27–March 3, 2022 at the Anaheim Convention Center & Anaheim Marriott #TMSAnnualMeeting.
Will is giving an invited talk at the Northwestern University Department of Materials Science and Engineering Winter 2022 colloquium series.
January 2022
Komal’s paper was published by Acta Materialia! The title is “Heterointerface and grain boundary energies, and their influence on microstructure in multiphase ceramics”
Will gave 2 invited talks at the 2022 Conference on Electronic Materials and Applications (EMA) in Orlando, Florida, USA. They are titled “Grain Boundary Segregation and Energy in Multiphase Oxide Ceramics Processed by Different Sintering Techniques” and “Towards characterization of the evolution of an electroceramic grain boundary network during thermal processing by in situ scanning transmission electron microscopy”.
Huiming’s paper was published by the Journal of Materials Research! The title is “Growth of nanoporous high entropy oxide thin films by pulsed laser deposition”
November 2021
Bin’s paper was published by Scripta Materialia! The title is “Short-range order localizing diffusion in multi-principal element alloys”
Komal’s paper was published by Nanoscale! The title is “Bulk and surface exsolution produces a variety of Fe-rich and Fe-depleted ellipsoidal nanostructures in La0.6Sr0.4FeO3 thin films”
Jenna’s paper was published by Frontiers in Chemistry! The title is “Probing Multiscale Disorder in Pyrochlore and Related Complex Oxides in the Transmission Electron Microscope: A Review”
Komal’s collaborative paper was published by Advanced Functional Materials! The title is “Exsolution Synthesis of Nanocomposite Perovskites with Tunable Electrical and Magnetic Properties”
August 2021
Komal Syed successfully defended her PhD, chaired by Prof. Martha Mecartney and co-chaired by Will. Congratulations Komal!
Hasti, Xin, and Jenna presented talks at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2021.
July 2021
Komal Syed was selected as a 2021 Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellow by the National Academies! Read more
Komal and Will attended UCI’s 2021 hooding ceremony with Yingjie Yang and Prof. Martha Mecartney. Congratulations Komal and Yingjie for earning a PhD!
Hasti’s paper has been published by Crystals! The title is “A Review of Grain Boundary and Heterointerface Characterization in Polycrystalline Oxides by (Scanning) Transmission Electron Microscopy”
March 2021
Will is presenting virtually at TMS 2021.
March is Women’s History Month! Learn more at https://womenshistorymonth.gov/
February 2021
Will received the National Science Foundation CAREER award from the Division of Materials Research (DMR). The award title is “CAREER: Tuning Interface Atomic Structure and Composition for Fast Ion Conduction” and will begin March 1, 2021. UCI News
Will is giving an invited talk by video at the 5th International Conference on Catalysis and Chemical Engineering (CCE-2021).
January 2021
The lab has been awarded a grant from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA). RCSA, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Thistledown Foundation have made awards totaling $1,155,000 to eight multidisciplinary teams from the United States and Canada in the inaugural year of Scialog: Negative Emissions Science.
November 2020
Will was a webinar panelist on “The Undergraduate Experience Webinar” hosted by the Microscopy Society of America Student Council (MSA StC). He shared his perspective on undergraduate research, and the MSA Undergraduate Scholarship. More MSA StC videos are available online.
Huge congratulations to Komal Syed for winning the 6th Annual Elevator Pitch Competition organized by GPS-STEM at UC Irvine!
October 2020
The lab has been awarded a grant from the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Fund! Will is the PI of this Doctoral New Investigator Grant, which will begin January 2021. See details on the School of Engineering page.
Will’s paper has been published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C! The title is “New Data-Driven Interacting-Defect Model Describing Nanoscopic Grain Boundary Compositions in Ceramics”. The work was a collaboration with the group of Prof. David Mebane of the University of West Virginia.
September 2020
Will was one of 10,234 signatories supporting a Letter by Paul H. Barber et al. titled “Systemic racism in higher education”, published in Science Magazine.
August 2020
Komal’s paper has been accepted for publication in Materialia! The title is “Correlations of Grain Boundary Segregation to Sintering Techniques in a Three-phase Ceramic”
Somnath’s paper was published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society!
We welcome to the lab Bin Xing, MSE Ph.D.! He joins the lab from Wuhan University in China, where he received his B.S. in Nuclear Engineering and Technology. Bin will be co-advised by Prof. Penghui Cao to study structure-property relationships through computational methods; very exciting!
We welcome to the lab Jenny Martinez, MSE Ph.D.! She joins the lab from the California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, with research experience at Rutgers State University and the California Institute of Technology. Her outstanding scholarship, research, and service contributions have been recognized via the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship. Jenny will be studying gas-solid interactions using electron microscopy; very exciting!
Will is giving a talk at Microscopy and Microanalysis on the work of Sai Muktevi, Jenna Wardini, and David Carreon.
July 2020
The UC Irvine MRSEC – Materials Discovery Through Atomic Level Structural Design and Charge Control – has been funded by the National Science Foundation! The Bowman Lab will participate in this multi-lab, multi-university Materials Research Science and Engineering Center lead by Prof. Xiaoqing Pan of UCI over the next 6 years.
June 2020
UCI MSE created the Anti-Racism Working Group.
April 2020
Will’s paper was published by Acta Materialia. The paper is titled “The role of doping and microstructure on hydrogen solubility in monoclinic ZrO2: Experimental validations of simulated defect chemistry.”
January 2020
Jason won an Undergraduate Research Scholarship from the Microscopy Society of America! Based on his research proposal, MSA will provide financial support to fund his research in the lab over the next year. Congratulations Jason! Link to UCI SSoE article.
Somnath is giving an invited talk at the 44th International Conference and Expo on Advanced Ceramics and Composites (ICACC 2020) in Daytona Beach, Florida. The talk is titled: “Engineering eco-friendly spinel-periclase refractories for RH degasser steelmaking” and can be viewed online here.
Jenna is moderating a webinar hosted by the Microscopy Society of America Student Council. The webinar will focus on best practices for Communicating Science.
The Bowman Lab welcomes Undergraduate Researchers Shengquan Xuan, Fernando Robledo and Jason Luong, Bachelor Students in MSE!
December 2019
Will was elected as a Director of the Microanalysis Society. He will serve a term of three years.
Will gave an invited talk at The UCI School for Transmission Electron Microscopy (UCI-STEM). The title was “Introduction to transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning TEM (STEM)”
Will gave an invited talk at The Second International Symposium on Advanced Microscopy and Spectroscopy (ISAMS-2). The title was “Linking nanoscale composition to electrical conductivity of grain boundaries in oxides”
November 2019
Will’s paper was accepted by ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. The paper is titled “Linking macroscopic and nanoscopic ionic conductivity: A semi-empirical framework for characterizing grain boundary conductivity in polycrystalline ceramics”.
Will’s ChemRxiv preprint is online titled: “A New Data-Driven Interacting-Defect Model Describing Nanoscopic Grain Boundary Compositions in Ceramics”.
Will gave an invited talk at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) in Anaheim, CA.
Will was a webinar panelist to discuss Benefits of membership in the Microscopy Society of America. The webinar was hosted by the MSA Student Council.
October 2019
The Bowman Lab welcomes Somnath Mandal, PhD Student in MSE!
September 2019
The Bowman Lab welcomes Jenna Wardini, PhD Student in MSE!
August, 2019
Komal accepted the Student Scholar Award for Microscopy and Microanalysis from the Microanalysis Society. She also presented her research on sintering techniques applied to three-phase ceramics. Congratulations Komal!
June, 2019
Hasti and Jairo have been awarded the Goldstein Scholar Award from the Microanalysis Society. They will use this support to attend the 2020 Arizona State University Winter School on High Resolution Electron Microscopy. Congratulations Hasti and Jairo!
The Bowman Lab welcomes Jairo Gonzalez, PhD Student in MSE!
The Bowman Lab welcomes Anirudh Chari, Visiting Graduate Student in MSE!
May, 2019
The Bowman Lab welcomes Komal Syed, PhD Student in MSE!
April, 2019
Hasti was awarded the 2018-19 Samueli School of Engineering PhD Bridge Fellowship. Congratulations Hasti!
April, 2019
The Bowman Lab welcomes Hasti Vahidi, PhD Student in MSE!
April 1, 2019
The Bowman Lab officially opens!