Grad student receives award for nanocalorimetry research

Materials Science and Engineering graduate student Lito de la Rama received a silver award for his presentation and research on nanocalorimetry at the April Materials Research Society (MRS) Meeting and Exhibit Graduate Student Awards competition.

MRS Graduate Student Awards recognize graduate students with excellent academic achievements and materials science research. De la Rama was selected out of 122 other applicants to present his paper, “Size Dependent Melting of Magic Size Materials,” at the conference. The twenty finalists who presented received either gold or silver awards at the conference.

Material Science and Engineering graduate student Lito de la Rama received a silver award for his research on nanocalorimetry at the Materials Research Society Meeting. He's pictured here receiving his award from MRS president Orlando Auciello.

De la Rama’s research focuses on a technique developed by his research group, under the guidance of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and CSL Professor Leslie Allen, called nanocalorimetry. The group, which is funded by a three-year NSF grant, is working on a project called “Thermal analysis of 2D lamellar crystals.”

Nanocalorimetry is a technique used to measure the thermodynamic properties of nanoscale systems with sensitivity of less than a nanojoule per Kelvin. According to de la Rama, materials present unique properties at the nanoscale and he is working to understand the thermodynamics of these systems.

When certain materials form, they create thin sheets called lamella, with a very high aspect ratio since the lateral dimensions can be in microns while the thickness is only a few nanometers. De la Rama and his group have developed a sensitive, fast-scanning thin film nanocalorimetry device to measure how metal nanoparticles, polymer thin films and lamellar crystals melt and they have developed a new synthesis method to control the thickness of the lamella.

These polymer thin films can be used in a variety of ways including asphotoresist in lithography or as platforms for biosensors.

“Our research is more fundamental, so we don’t know where exactly this could be applicable in the future,” de la Rama said. “For my material specifically, our lamella is similar in structure to our biological cell walls, so we think there could be some biological implications, as well as potential applications in many other fields such as microelectronics.”

This NanoDSC is a chip-based, ultra-sensitive, thin-film device that de la Rama uses in his research. On one side of the nitride window is metal thin film, which serves both as a heater when current is applied and as a thermometer after temperature calibration against a standard resistance temperature detector (RTD).

De la Rama will graduate in August 2013 with a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering and has accepted a position at SanDisk Corporation as a failure analysis engineer for flash memory products. De la Rama worked in industry for five years before coming to graduate school and believes those experiences helped him have a different perspective in the way he approached his research.

MRS attracts over 5,000 researchers in disciplines related to materials research to its spring conference in San Francisco. There are over 50 technical sessions to attend, along with several thousand papers and poster presentations every year.

While the MRS Graduate Student Award is an academic award, de la Rama believes the experience will help him as he enters back into industry.

“People who get this award will move on to be successful in their field that they chose and I’m hoping I’ll be able to continue that tradition,” he said.