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Here, the MRSEC team at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville presents a hybrid machine learning (ML) framework that integrates a physically constrained variational autoencoder (pc-VAE) with different Bayesian optimization (BO) methods to systematically accelerate and improve crystal structure refinement, from traditional least-square based refinement, with resolution of defects.

Through “Mission: Materials Science,” a long-running outreach initiative supported by Penn State’s U.S. National Science Foundation-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), graduate students from across disciplines have partnered with museum educators and media professionals to transform materials science research into free, hands-on learning activities. The newest collection, recently launched online, adds four experiments designed for children ages 8 to 13.

When Allan H. MacDonald, a theoretical physicist at The University of Texas at Austin and a faculty investigator in UT Austin’s Center for Dynamics and Control of Materials, an NSF MRSEC, began exploring two-dimensional materials decades ago, the field was still taking shape. Today, that work has helped define an entirely new area of nanoscience — and earned him one of science’s major international honors.

Yishu Wang has been elected as one of three new general members to the SNS-HFIR User Group (SHUG) Executive Committee (EC) starting January 1, 2026. SHUG consists of all persons interested in using the neutron scattering facilities at Oak Ridge. It provides input to the management on user concerns, provides a forum for keeping the entire community informed of issues and progress at these facilities, and serves as an advocacy group for neutron scattering science at these facilities.

Penn MRSEC Seed researchers Mathijssen and Tao showed that the length of a swimming bacterium and the geometry of the porous environment around it jointly determine whether the cell traverses or becomes trapped, and used that coupling to propose a passive physical mechanism for sorting antimicrobial-resistant bacteria from drug-affected ones.

Penn MRSEC Seed researchers Vining and Purohit, with Radhakrishnan, showed that under large compressive strains characteristic of growing tumors, water flow through the porous extracellular matrix dominates stress relaxation, alters growth-factor transport, and reshapes how a tumor proliferates over physiological timescales.

Penn MRSEC researchers Stebe and Lee developed a 3D-printable ink that, after extrusion, spontaneously phase-separates into a bicontinuous oil-water emulsion stabilized by fumed silica nanoparticles, locking in two interpenetrating channels with sub-micron domains while the printed object holds an arbitrary centimeter-scale shape.

Penn MRSEC researchers Durian and Katifori built a network of custom bistable electronic elements whose pattern of edge voltages records the history of how the network was driven, inspired by the multistable flow behavior seen in plant vasculature.