Sebastian Kube earns DARPA Young Faculty Award

Sebastian Kube, an assistant professor in materials science and engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has earned a 2025 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award.

The highly competitive DARPA Young Faculty Award program provides funding, mentoring, and industry and national security contacts to researchers in junior faculty positions at academic and non-profit research institutions across the United States. The goal is to develop the next generation of academic scientists, engineers and mathematicians whose long-term research focus has the potential to address national security needs.

Kube, who joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 2024, was selected for a proposal to develop an autonomous platform to develop oxidation-resistant alloys.

Emerging applications in aerospace, energy and other domains need alloys and coatings that can withstand harsh oxidative conditions above 1,300 degrees Celsius, or about 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Testing the oxidation-resistance of alloys using current conventional methods, however, is excruciatingly slow and costly.

That’s why Kube is developing an autonomous testing platform that uses robotics, automation and artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery process. The platform will autonomously synthesize oxidation-resistant refractory alloys and coatings and test them in situ. 

The process will speed up the synthesis, testing and optimization of oxidation-resistance by orders of magnitude, reducing the development timeline of new alloys and coatings from decades to months. These advanced materials have potential applications in turbines, jet engines, rocket nozzles, nuclear reactors, high-speed aerospace vehicles, and many other cutting-edge technologies.