College of Engineering - University of Wisconsin-Madison

ECE Discovery Panel: ECE Named BS Degree Options
2025-10-28 12:20 - 12:50 (America/Chicago) | 2317 Engineering Hall, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, 53711
Join us as ECE Teaching Faculty Srdjan Milicic, Assistant Teaching Professor Setareh Behroozi, and Assistant Teaching Professor Eduardo R. Arvelo talk about the four named BS degree options within ECE. Degree options prepare students for careers in electrical or computer engineering with an emphasis on a specific area of the field. Learn more about how to declare this option, what courses to choose within your 120-credit curriculum, and what career opportunities open up with this degree distinction.Electrical Engineering: Semiconductor Engineering, BS

Computer Engineering: Semiconductor Engineering, BS

Electrical Engineering: Machine Learning and Data Science, BS

Computer Engineering: Machine Learning and Data Science, BS

Jimmy John’s sandwiches will be provided!

Srdjan Milicic

Setareh Behroozi

Eduardo R. Arvelo

CBE Seminar Series: Seth Darling
2025-10-28 16:00 - 17:00 | WI
Seth DarlingArgonne National LaboratoryLemont, IL

Layered Phyllosilicate Membranes for Energy-Critical Ion Separations in Resource Recovery

Energy systems depend not only on resilient generation and efficient storage but also on the management of critical materials. One of the most pressing challenges is the selective extraction and purification of ions from complex aqueous environments—such as recovering lithium from brines or separating rare earth elements from waste streams—using processes that are both energy-efficient and scalable. In this talk, I will present recent advances in designing and deploying two-dimensional laminar membranes based on earth-abundant phyllosilicate minerals for these applications.

Our work harnesses exfoliated vermiculite and montmorillonite flakes, which are reassembled into flexible, robust membranes with tunable interlayer galleries. Through the use of molecular cross-linkers (e.g., alkanediamines) and inorganic pillaring agents (e.g., Keggin clusters), we achieve control over interlayer spacing and surface charge, enabling precise tuning of ion transport properties. This design flexibility opens pathways to address critical separations. The resulting membranes exhibit outstanding aqueous stability, low-cost scalability, and performance characteristics rivaling or surpassing synthetic alternatives.

Beyond material synthesis and processing, I will share insights from our newly developed high-throughput ion permeation platform, which enables rapid, parallelized measurements across a wide parameter space of membrane chemistry, structure, and testing conditions. This dataset supports the development of machine learning models aimed at predicting ion transport performance from structural descriptors and experimental metadata—laying the groundwork for a material genome approach to membrane design. By connecting scalable materials chemistry with targeted energy applications, this research exemplifies a holistic approach to energy materials innovation—from atoms to applications.

ISYE - IISE info session with Grainger
2025-10-28 17:00 - 18:00 | TBD, 1513 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin, 53706-1539, United States
1227 Engineering Hall

Information session with industry guest Grainger.

NEEP Seminar Series: Zahra Mohaghegh, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2025-10-30 12:00 - 13:00 | WI
Thursday, October 3012:00 – 1:00pm106 Engineering Research BuildingPlease contact office@neep.wisc.edu for assistance with remote participation.

Managing Uncertainty in Efficiency, Safety, and Independence in a New Era of Nuclear RegulationNuclear power regulation is entering a new era, shaped by technological advancements and major legal shifts— especially the ADVANCE Act and the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. These changes have introduced unprecedented uncertainty into the regulatory landscape. This talk presents an analysis from an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of nuclear engineering, risk assessment, and administrative law, focusing on three key questions: (i) What does “efficient” regulation and licensing mean under the new legal mandate? (ii) Will current safety methods, such as Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA), remain viable? (iii) What role does regulatory independence play in ensuring safety? In addressing the second question, the talk will also highlight ongoing research to advance PRA for next-generation reactors and aging plants undergoing policy changes and modernization, including the integration of AI-driven technologies.

Zahra MohagheghZahra Mohaghegh is a Professor and Donald Biggar Willett Faculty Scholar in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where she leads the Socio-Technical Risk Analysis (SoTeRiA) Research Laboratory. Her research advances risk science to improve the safety and economic viability of complex technologies, including commercial nuclear power plants and advanced reactors. Dr. Mohaghegh’s expertise includes probabilistic risk assessment, human-system reliability, probabilistic physics of failure, AI trustworthiness, uncertainty analysis, and risk-informed regulation. She has received numerous honors, including the NSF Mid-Career Achievement Award, the George Apostolakis Award in Risk Assessment, multiple Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Research, and the ANS Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women’s Achievement Award. She also serves on committees of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, actively bridging technical innovation and policymaking in high-consequence industries.

Hammad Khalid Hammad Khalid is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate and graduate research assistant at the Socio-Technical Risk Analysis (SoTeRiA) lab at UIUC, advised by Prof. Zahra Mohaghegh. His research focuses on developing the Socio-Technical Risk-Informed Automation Trustworthiness Evaluation (ST-RATE) framework—an integrated approach to assess the trustworthiness of AI-driven automation in high-consequence systems such as nuclear power plants. Hammad has contributed to research projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. He is a recipient of the Mavis Future Faculty Fellowship and the NEST Fellowship. He holds a Master’s in Nuclear Energy Science and Engineering from Beijing, and a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from PIEAS, Pakistan.

ISyE - Pumpkin patch visit, hosted by HFES
2025-10-30 15:00 - 17:00 | Schuster’s Farm, 1326 US Highway 12 & 18, Deerfield, Wisconsin, 53531
Fall is in full swing! 🍁🎃

Grab your friends and join us at the Pumpkin Patch on Thursday October 30 — where cozy vibes and perfect pumpkins await. Whether you’re here to escape from the corn maze, pick the biggest pumpkin, snap cute photos, or just soak in the autumn air, we’ve got you covered.

If you need a ride, or can offer a ride, please let us know!

Pumpkin patch carpooling

ME 903 Graduate Seminar: Professor Evangelos Theodorou
2025-10-30 16:00 - 17:00 | 3M Auditorium, rm 1106 Mechanical Engineering Building, 1513 University Ave, Madison, 53711
The ME 903: Graduate Student Lecture Series features campus and visiting speakers who present on a variety of research topics in the field of mechanical engineering. Professor Evangelos Theodorou is a professor at Georgia Tech.

Mechanics Seminar: Bonnie Bachman
2025-10-31 12:05 - 12:55 | 3M Auditorium, rm 1106 Mechanical Engineering Building, 1513 University Ave, Madison, 53711
The Mechanics Seminar Series is a weekly seminar given by campus and visiting speakers on topics across the spectrum of mechanics research (solids, fluids, and dynamics). Bonnie Bachman is the TEO Director and I-Corps Program Director at UW-Madison.

BME Seminar Series: EnsoData
2025-11-03 12:00 - 13:00 | 1003 (Tong Auditorium) Engineering Centers Building, 1550 Engineering Drive, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
The Entrepreneurial Journey of EnsoData Co-Founders

Chris Fernandez BMEBS’14, MS’15; Ensodata Co-founder, Executive Chairman and Chief Research OfficerNick Glattard BMEBS’14, MS’15; EnsoData Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer

Hear firsthand how two BME alumni turned a bold idea into a nationally recognized startup.

Nick Glattard (BMEBS ’14, MS ’15) and Chris Fernandez (BMEBS ’14, MS ’15), Cofounders of EnsoData, will share their remarkable journey from UW–Madison biomedical engineering students to leading a cutting-edge company that’s transforming sleep medicine. Their presentation will delve into the challenges and triumphs of building EnsoData.

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ISyE - Ice cream social, hosted by IISE
2025-11-03 18:00 - 20:00 | Memorial Union, 800 Langdon St, Madison, Wisconsin, 53706, United States
Memorial Union

Please join IISE for an ice cream social at one of our favorite places – Memorial Union. This event is especially geared for our freshmen, but is open to all Industrial Engineering students. Enjoy ice cream, games, and a chance to meet your fellow classmates.

WECE Coffee Break with Adria Brooks
2025-11-04 12:00 - 14:00 | 4610 Engineering Hall, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, 53711
Join Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering (WECE) for a coffee break with ECE alumna Dr. Adria Brooks, Director of Transmission Planning at Grid Strategies LLC. Stop by at any time from noon to 2:00 to enjoy free Einstein bagels and coffee.

Dr. Brooks is a recipient of a 2025 College of Engineering Early Career Award which will be presented on Engineers’ Day, November 7.

LinkedIn

Grad School Virtual Info Session
2025-11-05 09:00 - 10:00 | WI
Join us to learn more about graduate school with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UW-Madison! We will be hosting virtual sessions on the first Wednesday of every month from June through December from 9:00-10:00am CST. Please RSVP here.

Those who attend will learn more about:

Mechanical Engineering Department programs overview (including department research overview)

Research MS and PhD program information

Professional (course-only) based MS program information

Admissions Information

Faculty & Graduate Student Panel

Q&A

Much More!

Questions? Email us at dept@me.engr.wisc.edu

ECE Distinguished Speaker Seminar Series: Professor Grace Xing
2025-11-05 15:00 - 16:00 | 2305 Engineering Hall, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
AlN – a New Platform for Electronics

Abstract:AlN has been ardently pursued as one of the most promising ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors (UWBGs) after GaN and SiC as the industry has been expanding rapidly on the high-volume manufacturing of GaN and SiC based technologies, including 12-inch GaN-on-Si, 8-inch SiC substrates and processing foundries etc. AlN is CMOS compatible with high thermal conductivity, high acoustic velocity and a rich family of heterostructures. Recently, Sc-, B- and Y-doped AlN alloys have garnered tremendous interest for their ferroelectric behavior. In this talk, I will focus on findings in our journey to develop new electronic devices on AlN in the past two decades.

Wurtzite III-nitrides are well known as a family of polar semiconductors. When sandwiching a narrow gap III-nitride layer with wider gap barrier materials, one interface is characterized as the negative polarization charge interface while the other as the positive polarization charge interface. The polarization charges are fixed in space and emanating electric field while the entire material stack will do everything it can to minimize its total free energy due to the thermodynamic driving force. As a result, compensating charges can be generated: either mobile charge carriers including delocalized electrons and holes, or charged defect states that are localized in the real and energy space. If undesired defect formation is sufficiently suppressed in the heterostructure, mobile charge carriers will be generated and can be harvested for electronic applications. To this end, we succeeded in generating both mobile electrons and holes in thin GaN quantum well sandwiched by AlN. I will discuss how we generate and detect these mobile charges, and some demonstrated utilities in terms of fundamental understanding and practical applications.

Professor Grace Xing

Bio:Huili Grace Xing is currently the Director of SUPREME – a SRC JUMP2.0 research center, the William L. Quackenbush Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University, and has recently served as the Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies of the College of Engineering.

She is a recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, ISCS Young Scientist Award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, and the SIA/SRC University Researcher Award. She is a fellow of APS, IEEE & AAAS.

Xing received a B.S. in physics from Peking University, M.S. in Material Science from Lehigh University and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Santa Barbara, respectively. She was a faculty member with the University of Notre Dame from 2004 to 2014. Her research focuses on development of III-V nitrides, 2-D crystals, oxide semiconductors, recently also multiferroics & magnetic materials: growth, electronic and optoelectronic devices, especially the interplay between material properties and device development for high performance devices, including RF/THz devices, tunnel field effect transistors, power electronics, DUV emitters and memories. Together with her colleague Debdeep Jena, they were the first to demonstrate distributed polarization doping (DPD), especially the p-type DPD in nitride semiconductors. This doping scheme is fundamentally different from impurity doping and modulation doping, thus dubbed as the 3rd generation of doping science by Xing. Polarization doping is particularly powerful in polar ultrawide bandgap semiconductors since it might be the only known method to achieve both n-type and p-type in an UWBG semiconductor with doping properties akin to shallow impurity dopants.

Xing has delivered 200+ invited talks and seminars, and has authored/co-authored 350+ journal papers including Nature journals, Physical Review Letters, Applied Physics Letters, Electron Device Letters, and 140+ conference proceeding publications in IEDM, ISPSD etc. Her h-index is 89 on google scholar.

NEEP Seminar Series: Michael Tonks, University of Florida
2025-11-06 12:00 - 13:00 | WI
Thursday, November 612:00 – 1:00pm106 Engineering Research BuildingPlease contact office@neep.wisc.edu for assistance with remote participation.

An electrochemical phase-field model for the corrosion of structural alloys by molten saltsModeling and simulation must play a critical role in accelerating the development and qualification of materials for advanced reactors, such as molten salt reactors (MSRs). MSRs are an advanced reactor concept that uses molten salts as either the coolant or both coolant and fuel solvent. However, molten salts can corrode salt facing alloys, introducing corrosion products into the salt that can precipitate in the cold leg of the loop. To evaluate and improve alloy corrosion behavior, we have developed an electrochemical phase-field model for capturing the microstructure-dependent corrosion of structural alloys by molten salts. The model has been applied to the corrosion of nickel-based alloys and stainless steels by molten fluoride and chloride salts. It can represent impurity-limited corrosion in static corrosion experiments and includes the role of activity gradient corrosion with dissimilar alloys for the alloy coupon and salt capsule. We have also applied the model to investigate the impact of pure Ni coatings on the corrosion of Ni-Cr alloys. Working with Drs. Couet and Sridharan, we are adding the impact of radiation to the model. We are also working with them and Dr. Zhang on better understanding the impact of water vapor on corrosion.

Michael R Tonks is the Interim Department Chair and Alumni Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Nuclear Engineering at the University of Florida. Prior to joining UF in the Fall of 2017, he was an Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University for two years and a staff scientist in the Fuels Modeling and Simulation Department at Idaho National Laboratory for six years. Prof. Tonks was the original creator of the mesoscale fuel performance tool MARMOT and lead its development for five years. He helped to pioneer the approach taken in the DOE Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program to use multiscale modeling and simulation to inform the development of materials models for the BISON fuel performance tool that are based on microstructure rather than burn-up, and he won the NEAMS Excellence Award for that work in 2014. He also won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2017 and the TMS Brimacombe medal in 2022. His research is focused on using mesoscale modeling and simulation results coupled with experimental data to investigate the co-evolution of microstructure and properties in materials in harsh environments.

MS&E Seminar Series: Cyprian Emeka Uzoh
2025-11-06 13:00 - 14:00 | WI
UW-Madison Department of Materials Science and Engineering welcomes Cyprian Emeka Uzoh. His seminar, “Advances in high-performance metallization and packaging for advanced semiconductor applications”, will take place on Thursday, November 6 from 1-2 p.m. in MSE 265.

Bio

Cyprian Emeka Uzoh earned a Bachelor’s degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1978, followed by graduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He began his career as a research scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where his pioneering contributions to semiconductor metallization laid the groundwork for transformative advances in the field. Following his tenure at IBM, Uzoh continued to drive innovation through leadership roles in several leading technology companies, advancing the development and commercialization of cutting-edge metallization and packaging technologies. His inventions have become the foundation for modern high-performance devices, enabling the scalable fabrication of CPUs, GPUs, high-bandwidth memory, and advanced image sensors used worldwide. In late 1980s and early 1990s his discovery of the bottom-up metal filling process for submicron vias and trenches, along with the demonstration of its scalability to feature sizes below 100nm, would mark a significant advancement in semiconductor manufacturing. These innovations, combined with other Uzoh’s related contributions, enabled the fabrication of lower-cost microchips with both larger and smaller form factors, increased transistor density, and improved electrical performance. The resulting enhancements in interconnect efficiency and reliability have had a lasting impact on the performance and scalability of modern integrated circuits. Uzoh and his colleagues at IBM Research were named “Inventor of the Year 2006” for his discovery of the bottom-up metal filling process and their development of the copper interconnect technology. Uzoh is also a prolific inventor, with 404 Utility patents in the US and more than 750 worldwide.

Abstract

Copper interconnects have become a foundational component in advanced semiconductor manufacturing, serving as critical enablers for high-performance integrated circuits. Their low resistivity, high electromigration resistance, and compatibility with damascene processing have made them indispensable for fabricating leading-edge devices such as GPUs, CPUs, NPUs, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) modules, interposers, and CMOS image sensors. These components are integral to a broad spectrum of systems, ranging from edge devices like IoT nodes and mobile platforms to high-performance computing infrastructure, including data centers and exascale supercomputers. As device scaling continues and interconnect bottlenecks increasingly constrain system performance, the role of copper interconnects in achieving low-latency, high-throughput, and thermally optimized architectures remains critical. This discussion will explore the development and impact of pivotal innovations, including the invention of the proximity plating cell, bottom-up metal deposition in large cavities (ECMD), and the elimination of terminal effects in electroplating, each of which challenged established principles of electrodeposition kinetics. In addition, Uzoh will present in detail his pioneering work in enabling high-density 3D integrated circuits (3D-ICs) and the commercialization of hybrid bonding, a technique that allows for ultra-dense, high-performance chip stacking without the need for adhesive layers.

ME 903 Graduate Seminar: Laura Grossenbacher
2025-11-06 16:00 - 17:00 | 3M Auditorium, rm 1106 Mechanical Engineering Building, 1513 University Ave, Madison, 53711
The ME 903: Graduate Student Lecture Series features campus and visiting speakers who present on a variety of research topics in the field of mechanical engineering. Laura Grossenbacher is the Director of Technical Communications for the Interdisciplinary Professional Programs with the College of Engineering at UW-Madison.

ISYE - Scholarship Reception
2025-11-06 17:30 - 19:00 | Atrium – Mechanical Engineering Building, 1513 University Avenue, Madison, 53706
Join the Department of ISyE as we celebrate our 2025-2026 scholarship recipients.

Help ISyE celebrate our student scholarship recipients and thank our generous donors. There will be a brief ceremony, followed by a casual reception. RSVPs are required – scholarship recipients are asked to check their emails for an invitation. Donors may contact Jane Feller (jfeller3@wisc.edu) for more information.

Midwest Mechanics Seminar: Professor Dennis Kochmann
2025-11-07 11:00 - 12:00 | 3M Auditorium, rm 1106 Mechanical Engineering Building, 1513 University Ave, Madison, 53711
The Mechanics Seminar Series is a weekly seminar given by campus and visiting speakers on topics across the spectrum of mechanics research (solids, fluids, and dynamics). Professor Dennis Kochmann is professor at the Zurich Institute for Mechanical Systems.

CEE Engineers' Day Luncheon
2025-11-07 11:30 - 13:30 | Olbrich Botanical Gardens, 3330 Atwood Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin, 53704
Join alumni, faculty, staff and industry partners as we celebrate Engineers’ Day and honor our 2025 award recipients on Friday, November 7, at Olbrich Botanical Gardens. To assist with planning, please register by October 30.

Register now

Gabriel Lepak, Victoria (Tori) Nelson, Jan Kucher, Greg Harrington, Henry Byers, and Kimberly Gonzalez, PE, pose with NCEES awards during Engineers’ Day 2024.

Check-in and refreshments begin at 11:30 a.m., followed by lunch from Blue Plate Catering at 12:00 p.m., and a short program. This year’s honorees are:

Colin Fitzgerald, BSCE 2011, MSCE 2013, Global Principal for Water Resource Recovery at Jacobs

Dr. Berrin Tansel, PhD 1984, Professor of Environmental Engineering and Undergraduate Program Director at Florida International University

2025 NCEES award-winning capstone design teams for the historic Riverview Terrace project ($10,000 award) and Wausau Transit Facility project ($10,000 award)

All meals include a garden salad, starch/grains, fresh baked dinner rolls, and dessert. For the main dish, you may choose from:

Brandied chicken breast – sautéed chicken breast with a blend of chutney, brandy, and fresh herbs

Baked cod served with tartar sauce and a lemon wedge

Stuffed acorn squash with curry seasoned ancient grains quinoa salad and topped with red pepper coulis (vegan/gf)

Meals are $30 per person for alumni and friends of the department. Payment may be made on the day of the event via check or cash. Ample parking onsite is available free of charge.

CEE faculty and staff, along with Visiting Committee members, emeritus faculty, and award winners, are invited at no cost.

ISyE -Semi-annual alumni/student lunch!
2025-11-07 11:45 - 13:00 | 3126 Mechanical Engineering Building, 1513 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin, 53706
3126 ME

Join us for our semi-annual student/alumni lunch!

Our Industrial Advisory Board and our E-Day honorees will be visiting our department on Friday, November 7. All ISyE students are invited to join them for a casual lunch. This is a great opportunity to network with some of our department’s most accomplished alumni!

Meet the UW-ISyE Industrial Advisory Board members

ECE Tech Talk with Pankaj Patel
2025-11-07 12:00 - 13:00 | 2317 Engineering Hall, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, 53711
Pankaj Patel

Join us for pizza and a conversation with Nile Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Pankaj Patel. Patel will discuss his career path and share about his leadership in advancing next-generation network connectivity solutions and enterprise technology at Nile and, previously, Cisco Systems, Inc. This is a great opportunity to have your questions answered by a #BadgerEngineer. In recognition of his achievements throughout his career, Pankaj is receiving a College of Engineering Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award.

ME Engineers’ Day Luncheon & Lecture
2025-11-07 12:00 - 14:00 | Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, 330 North Orchard St., Madison, WI, 53715, United States
This free annual celebration gives Mechanical Engineering alumni an opportunity to meet with our current and emeritus faculty, members of our Industrial Advisory Board, department staff, and other friends.

The 2025 Engineers’ Day luncheon will begin at 12pm in the DeLuca Forum at the Discovery Center Building, include a brief program recognizing the 2025 honorees, and wrap up with a special ME150th Anniversary Lecture by Professor Emeritus Tim Osswald. Our 2025 honorees are Amir Mirzendehdel, Donald Wahlin, and 2024 honoree David Bierman.

Register Now! Contact cscott8@wisc.edu with any questions.

Fireside Chat: Barriers to New Nuclear (and How to Overcome Them)
2025-11-07 14:00 - 15:00 | WI
Friday, November 72:00 – 3:00 PMMorgridge Hall Room 2516

Join NEEP alumni Erik Nygaard and Kevin Nordt for a fireside chat as they discuss the barriers to new nuclear and their different perspectives on how to overcome those barriers to deploy next generation nuclear energy.

Kevin Nordt is the Executive Vice President-Chief Strategy Officer at Dairyland Power Cooperative, headquartered in La Crosse, WI. Nordt is an experienced energy executive, with more than thirty-five years of experience, in the power industry. At Dairyland Power, he is responsible for the overall corporate strategy, power supply portfolio management, resource development, and heads the coop’s advanced nuclear energy program. Over his career, Nordt has worked in both private and public power companies holding various engineering, finance, trading, and senior executive positions. He holds an MS in Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics, from UW-Madison, and BS in Mathematical Physics, from St. John’s University, NYC.

Erik Nygaard is the Acting President and Director of Product Development for BWXT Advanced Technologies, LLC, a subsidiary of BWX Technologies, Inc. (BWXT). Mr. Nygaard is responsible for the development of new products for Advanced Technologies, LLC, which includes commercial microreactors for terrestrial and maritime applications, data science solutions, and advanced manufacturing techniques.

Previously, he served as the director of Research and Engineering leading the organization’s design and technology development efforts for customers like NASA and the Department of Defense. He previously served as the Director of Isotope Research and Development, overseeing the company’s medical isotope technologies. Mr. Nygaard served various roles of increasing responsibility on BWXT’s small modular reactor project—mPower™. He began his career with BWXT as a nuclear analyst and acting chief engineer for MIPS—a solution reactor development program to produce medical radioisotopes. He holds three U.S. patents and two pending for propriety technologies associated with the medical isotope production. Mr. Nygaard holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he was licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a student operator of the University’s TRIGA reactor.

ISyE - Internship member panel
2025-11-10 18:00 - 19:00 | WI
A panel of IISE upperclassmen will share their internship experience for insight into the professional world!

Location TBD – Please check the IISE website for final details (linked below.)

Mechanical Engineering MS Overview & Career Outlook
2025-11-11 12:00 - 12:30 | WI
Program Overview & Career Outlook: Mechanical Engineering Programs

Join program staff to get more information about the Mechanical Engineering accelerated master’s programs and potential post-graduation career paths (domestic-focused).

RSVP here: https://uwmadison.tfaforms.net/5183433

ECE Discovery Panel: All about graduate school!
2025-11-11 12:20 - 12:50 | 2317 Engineering Hall, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, 53711
Join us as ECE faculty share all sorts of great information about applying to graduate school. Learn about what types of programs might be right for you, how the application process works, and when to begin to prepare…from those who have been through it all!

Jimmy John’s sandwiches will be provided.

ECE Discovery Panel: All about graduate school!
2025-11-11 12:20 - 12:50 | 2317 Engineering Hall, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, 53711
Is graduate school in your future? Join us in 2317 Engineering Hall where you can hear all about graduate programs from faculty in the know! All undergraduate students are welcome as Associate Teaching Professor Patrick Flannery, and Professors Parmesh Ramanathan (former Associate Dean for Graduate Education) and Hongrui Jiang (ECE Associate Chair for Graduate Studies) talk all about the research, accelerated, and online graduate programs available to you. Also, learn about the timeline and process for applying.

Jimmy John’s sandwiches will be served after the panel.

ECE Graduate Programs

Patrick Flannery

Hongrui Jiang

Parmesh Ramanathan

CBE Seminar Series: Jennifer Dunn
2025-11-11 16:00 - 17:00 | WI
Jennifer DunnNorthwestern UniversityEvanston, IL

Sustainability analysis of critical minerals supply chains: attributional and consequential life cycle assessment

By some estimates, more than three billion tons of minerals will be needed to manufacture the decarbonization technologies necessary to limit global warming to 2°C. This demand can be met through increasing production at existing mines, developing new mines, and recovering minerals through recycling of spent devices can also contribute. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a key analysis tool to evaluate and compare the environmental effects of producing minerals from different sources. This presentation will present recommendations for attributional LCA of minerals mining based on a literature review and apply them in the development of a perspective of a proposed mine in Minnesota. While attributional LCA aims to assign a unique environmental impact to a mineral product, consequential LCA aims to quantify the overall environmental effects from a change in mining activity. We present consequential LCA results that account for global carbon stock changes arising from the construction of new mines to meet mineral demand. Finally, we explore whether water demands for expanding lithium mining in the U.S. can be met, considering changes in water scarcity that climate change will cause, and what restrictions in water supply mean for the possibility of achieving a fully domestic lithium supply. Altogether, these different forms of sustainability analysis can address the advantages and disadvantages of expanding minerals production and help prioritize technologies and strategies that minimize adverse local environmental effects of mining while pursuing materials that are an important part of the solution to the global challenge of climate change. results from both will be discussed.

College of Engineering Head Shot Event
2025-11-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Mechanical Engineering Building, 1513 University Avenue, Madison, WI, 53706-1539, United States
Mechanical Engineering building

Are you in need of a professional headshot?

Curb magazine is offering a headshot session exclusively for the College of Engineering community. Anyone is welcome — students, faculty, staff, and friends and family. It costs $15 for three professional, edited shots. Cash or Venmo will be available on-site. Availability is first-come, first- serve. Sign up now!

College of Engineering headshot sign-up sheet

All of the money raised from the headshot event goes to produce Curb magazine, which is produced every fall and has won several national and regional awards in recent years.

MS&E Seminar Series: Dr. Saryu Fensin, Los Alamos National Laboratory
2025-11-13 13:00 - 14:00 | WI
UW-Madison Department of Materials Science and Engineering welcomes Dr. Saryu Fensin. Her seminar, “SPARK: Accelerating Alloy Discovery with AI and Self-Driving Labs”, will take place on Thursday, November 13 from 1-2 p.m. in MSE 265.

Bio

Dr. Saryu J. Fensin is a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the Materials Physics and Applications Division. Her research career has been defined by advancing the understanding of deformation and failure in materials under extreme conditions, with particular emphasis on high strain rate phenomena relevant to national security and advanced manufacturing. She has led experimental and modeling efforts to uncover how microstructure, defects, and interfaces control mechanical response across a wide range of alloys and composites.

Building on this foundation, Dr. Fensin has recently expanded her portfolio to include AI- and automation-driven materials discovery, serving as Principal Investigator on several projects that integrate machine learning with high-throughput experiments and autonomous laboratories. Her group’s work explores the strengths and limitations of AI in predicting alloy performance and demonstrates how thin film screening, bulk validation, and automated synthesis can be connected in closed-loop workflows for accelerated discovery.

She received her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, Davis, and has published widely on high-entropy alloys, shock physics, and automated approaches to alloy design. At LANL, she collaborates across disciplines to pioneer new paradigms for both fundamental understanding and rapid innovation in structural materials.

Abstract

The search for next-generation materials increasingly demands approaches that are faster and more predictive than trial-and-error. Our work began by exploring thin film deposition as a high-throughput method to screen refractory high-entropy alloys. Combinatorial sputtering allowed us to create entire libraries of compositions and rapidly probe phase stability and hardness trends. Thin films proved powerful for capturing intrinsic effects, such as the stability of single-phase BCC alloys, but direct comparisons with arc-melted bulk samples exposed their limits. Microstructural evolution—grain coarsening, segregation, and defect formation—often broke the simple link between film hardness and bulk yield strength. These insights motivated us to expand from thin films toward systematic bulk synthesis and validation.

To accelerate this process, we have coupled artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with experimental design. Our models predict yield strength and ductility across multi-principal element alloys, narrowing vast compositional spaces to promising candidates. Yet they also reveal their blind spots: defect-driven phenomena like segregation-induced embrittlement remain difficult to capture.

I will also introduce our automated laboratory platforms, where alloy synthesis, property measurement, and characterization are integrated into closed-loop, “self-driving” workflows. These systems enable rapid iteration between AI predictions and experiment while building the rich datasets needed to improve future models.

Together, thin film screening, bulk validation, and AI-driven automation point toward a new paradigm in materials discovery—where human intuition, machine learning, and autonomous laboratories combine to design structural alloys with unprecedented speed and precision.

ME 903 Graduate Seminar: Professor Katie Skinner
2025-11-13 16:00 - 17:00 | 3M Auditorium, rm 1106 Mechanical Engineering Building, 1513 University Ave, Madison, 53711
The ME 903: Graduate Student Lecture Series features campus and visiting speakers who present on a variety of research topics in the field of mechanical engineering. Professor Katie Skinner is a professor at the University of Michigan.
