The Center for Materials Research was established at WSU in 1993 to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration between various faculty members and to facilitate research and education in the area of materials science. It is under the joint administration of the College of Engineering and Architecture and the College of Sciences and has grown to include over 25 researchers from various disciplines. Dr. Kelvin Lynn was hired as the Center Director in 1996. Previously he had been a Brookhaven physicist for 23 years and had become world-renowned for his research in positron annihilation. Dr. Lynn holds the WSU Boeing Chair in Advanced Materials Science and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
The Center offers the opportunity for researchers in diverse fields at WSU to connect with funding sources in government and industry to find interdisciplinary answers to advanced materials problems. The faculty members at the Center address these research questions with some of today's most sophisticated scientific equipment. For more information, visit our pages about the Center's research and facilities and see the CMR Handbook.
Lynn Named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
PULLMAN, Wash. -- Kelvin Lynn, director of the Center for Materials Research at Washington State University, has been elected a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The prestigious honor is given for significant contributions to the advancement of science and requires election by peers in the association. The organization publishes the journal Science and has more than 138,000 members.
Lynn joined WSU in 1996 to direct the MRC, and he holds the Boeing Chair in Advanced Materials. Lynn, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, is world-renowned for his "positron annihilation" research. He obtained a doctoral in Materials Science in 1974 from the University of Utah and spent 22 years at Brookhaven National Lab as a senior physicist and head of the Materials Science Division. In recognition of his pioneering work in the design of positron beams, he received a Department of Energy Award in 1985 in Sustained Outstanding Research. He has recently expanded his interests to laser crystals and wide band gap semiconductors.
In 2000, WSU received a $1.1 million grant to build an antimatter-physics research laboratory, on which Lynn is the lead researcher. The grant was the university’s first from the W.M. Keck Foundation, which is noted for funding innovative projects with potential for breakthrough scientific discoveries. Research with particles of antimatter, called positrons, probes the basic interactions and properties of matter and has broad potential applications ranging from the development of a new generation of materials, such as high-quality computer microchips to detecting atomic size defects in thin layers or surfaces of materials. Such research helps advance the development of microelectronics, semiconductors and composites. Other antimatter research is aimed at solving puzzles of galactic proportions such as positron annihilations in interstellar gas or new states of matter.
Contact:
Center for Materials Research, (509)335-1131, cmr@wsu.edu