Spotlight on Growing Diamonds at UAB






Ribbon cutting for the new $75 million dollar East Science Hall (ESH) and South Science Hall (SSH) took place on Thursday, August 17, 2023.  Visitors from on and off campus participated in the festivities which included guided tours of the building’s research labs, teaching labs, new offices and much more.  ESH and SSH house the Departments of Physics, Biology and Chemistry.  Dr. Yogesh K. Vohra, Professor of Physics and University Scholar, had the pleasure of leading the tour of the diamond fabrication lab along with Q&A about the process and uses.





Below is an excerpt of an extensive article by Al.com on Dr. Vohra’s process for growing diamonds:





The Microwave Plasma Chemical Vapor Deposition reactor (CVD), which uses microwave power to break down methane and hydrogen gases to grow diamonds in the lab, has now been moved to a basement room of the new building. The South Science Hall and East Science Hall, part of the new Science and Engineering Complex, opened Thursday.





Large tanks are ready to combine methane and hydrogen into a mixture to produce high-pressure, high-temperature, nitrogen-doped synthetic diamonds.  Yogesh Vohra, professor of physics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, held up several samples of yellow diamond crystals made in UAB’s lab to show a tour group.





You can read the full article here.

	


	




	
	

	
	

		
2023 Summer Expo Winners
	


		
	
	

		

Congratulations to our Physics REU Expo Winners:  Lea Hebert, Chandni Bhat, Oscar Allen and Karim Haddad





Lea Hebert


Lea Hebert
Grambling State University 
2nd Place Engineering 
Mentors:  Dr. Vinoy Thomas & Grad Student Renjith Pillai







Chandni Bhat


Chandni Bhat
University of Alabama
2nd Place Engineering
Mentor Dr. Jonathan Burns







Allen_Oscar


Oscar Allen
Middle Tennessee State University
3rd Place Works in Progress
Mentor:  Dr. Pengfei Wang







Karim Haddad


FTPP/RIPP REU Karim Haddad
University of Alabama at Birmingham
3rd Place (Tie) Physical and Applied Science
Mentor Dr. Renato Camata


















	


	




	
	

	
	

		
2023 REU Has Come and Gone
	


		
	
	

		

Meet our 2023 Summer REU participants:  (front l-r): Oscar Allen, Taylor Brown, Edwina Brown, Maurissa Higgins, Jadyn Parker, Jada Paige, Karim Haddad 





(Back  row l-r): David Heson, Lea Hebert, Sophia Cornelius, Isaiah Bastien, Victor Cordero, Isaac Mendez, Mikhail Guchkov, Wesley Sutton, Jonathan Perkins





Another successful Summer REU program has come and gone.  It was our pleasure to host this exceptional group of students from across the country.





 You can check out the slideshow of the REUs in action in their research labs.





We look forward to next year’s program.  Application for Summer 2024 will be available online December 1, 2023.

	


	




	
	

	
	

		
Dr. Yogesh Vohra receives $8 Million DOE NNSA Award for  a Stewardship Science Academic Alliances Center of Excellence
	


		
	
	

		

The University of Alabama at Birmingham has been awarded $8 million from the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Agency. Distributed over five years, the award will establish one of nine Stewardship Science Academic Alliances Centers of Excellence.





UAB’s cooperative agreement will be for the Center for Additively Manufactured Complex Systems under Extremes.





Yogesh Vohra, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Physics and associate dean for Research and Innovation in the College of Arts and Sciences, will serve as the principal investigator.  Read UAB News full story here.






	


	





	
	

	
	

		
January 2023 CNMB Member Spotlight: Dr. Eugenia Kharlampieva
	


		
	
	

		

Dr. Euguenia Kharmlampieva, CNMB Co-director, is among 3 UAB chemists fighting cancer.  Kharlampieva and Veronika Kozlovskaya, Ph.D., research associate in Kharlampieva’s lab and her longtime collaborator, have created a cloaking device for fragile anti-cancer drugs. Their nanocapsules can be 60 times smaller than a red blood cell and produced at industrial scale. And they are smart; that is, they can release their cargo at precise locations when triggered by a burst of ultrasound energy, a specified temperature or the acidic environment around cancer cells. Click here to see original article in it’s entirety as published in the UAB Reporter.