UCSB’s Pollock Receives Vannevar DoD Fellowship

Tresa Pollock, chair of the materials department of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), has received a 2017 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

The award includes $3 million to fund five years of Pollock's research, which is aimed at developing a 3D platform for discovering new materials capable of operating in extreme environments such as those experienced by rockets, aircraft engines and hypersonic flight vehicles.

"I am very honored to be selected for this award, which is named after a visionary scientist who shaped the U.S. research infrastructure," Pollock said. "I am also grateful for the research support this provides and for the support the DoD has provided for many of my previous research efforts. The Vannevar Bush Fellowship will allow us to pursue research in directions not possible with other types of research programs."

The fellowship program provides awards to top-tier scientists from U.S. universities to conduct revolutionary "high-risk, high pay-off" research for DoD challenges.

"For Tresa Pollock to receive a prestigious Vannever Bush Award from the U.S. Department of Defense is a tremendous and well-deserved honor,” said Rod Alferness, dean of UCSB's College of Engineering. "I have no doubt that the funding that comes with the fellowship will enable her and her team to develop breakthroughs in 3D printing, nanoscale analysis and efficient production of important new materials."

Building upon a combined laser and electron-beam tomography system she developed at UCSB, Pollock will design and integrate an additional open-source, highly automated laser-powder-processing platform that can be operated either in layer-by-layer additive build mode for a given material or in combinatorial chemistry mode to vary chemistry locally. The 3D platform will enable exploration of previously inaccessible design spaces of higher-dimensional compositional materials and will also provide rapid acquisition of 3D information about the materials' chemistry, structure and crystallography.