Materials Science & Engineering

Each spring, our senior design teams showcase their hard work and innovation through final presentations, and a team is selected to represent the department at the school-wide Celebration of Engineering senior design department champions competition. We’re thrilled to announce that Alessandra Cabrera, Evelyn Carpenter and Lucy Plant have been chosen for their project, “Photothermal Desalination for Efficient, Energy-Cheap Freshwater Production”
Congratulations to this outstanding team—and to all of our seniors for delivering truly professional, impactful presentations. We couldn’t be prouder!
📅 Join us at the Celebration of Engineering
🕑 June 5 | 2–5 PM
📍 Bossone Lobby & Mitchell Auditorium
Come explore incredible student work across disciplines, including:
• Senior design department champions
• First-year design projects
• Undergraduate research
• Open senior design submissions
Cast your vote for your favorites and help celebrate the creativity and innovation of our engineering students!

International co-op greetings from Braxton Troxel, who is working as a research assistant for the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing, a public research institute in Singapore! At A*STAR Braxton is conducting computational materials research, running DFT calculations and training machine learning interatomic potentials so that researchers can better understand the structures and properties of the amorphous phases of optical phase change materials as well as their crystallization kinetics.

Joining him for the photo are his supervisor Dr. Liu Yun and Valerie Lim, Director for the Global Career Center.

Spring and summer mean co op season for Drexel MSE students—and we love hearing where their experiences take them!

For her final co op, fourth year student Olivia Chille is working as a cosmetic formulation chemist at Good Molecules, supporting the development and optimization of skincare products. From formulating and testing prototypes to evaluating ingredient performance and assisting with stability and compatibility studies, Olivia is gaining hands on experience at every stage of product development.

As Olivia shares: “This experience has been giving me hands on exposure to product development and the practical application of chemistry in the cosmetics industry!”
Love to see our students applying their knowledge and skills in exciting, real world settings! 💄🔬

Congratulations to department head Caroline Schauer for being elected AAAS Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science! AAAS is one of the largest global scientific societies with members in more than 91 countries around the world. It is also a leading publisher of scientific research through its Science family of journals. AAAS Fellowship is recognized as one of the most prestigious distinctions in the scientific community. Read more at https://drexel.edu/engineering/news-events/news/archive/2026/April/schauer-aaas-fellow/