Dr. Le Zhou, who has been a familiar face around UCF MSE, will be leaving UCF to embark on the next career challenge, namely a tenure-track assistant professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dr. Le Zhou earned his B.S. degree in materials science and engineering from Beihang University in 2010 and came to UCF to earn his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Central Florida in 2016 under the supervision of Dr. Yongho Sohn. He developed a high throughput approach to rapidly discover and characterize magnetocaloric materials during his doctoral study and was a recipient of the Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Dr. Zhou continued to work with Dr. Yongho Sohn as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate to start an ambitious new research project on metallic alloy development for additive manufacturing, also commonly known as 3D printing. With sponsorship from the US Army Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research, and Idaho National Laboratory of Department of Energy, Dr. Zhou has led a research team to develop several aluminum alloys that exhibited excellent printability and properties. For this new research area, Le also worked with graduate and undergraduate students to establish a laboratory with the streamlined capability of closed-loop research for powder production, metal additive manufacturing, and materials characterization/testing. At the same time, he has collaborated with many scientists and engineers around the world, including several faculty members of UCF such as Dr. Haebum Yun at the Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering Department and Dr. Yang Yang of Nanoscience and Technology Center/MSE. He has accrued over 45 journal publications, over 1000 citations, and h-index 17 (all since 2015). Dr. Zhou will begin his new journey starting the fall semester of 2020 and will continue to conduct his research in physical metallurgy, microstructural control and characterization, additive manufacturing, and powder processing for a wide variety of metallic materials.
