William Albert ME ’12 Presents at Prestigious International Conference on Materials Science and Nanotechnology

William Albert ME ’12 represented Villanova among 6,000 presenters at 47 technical symposia at the Materials Research Society (MRS) 2011 Fall Meeting in Boston – one of the most distinguished and largest meetings in materials science and nanotechnology in the world.

Albert presented “The Experimental and Theoretical Analysis of Characterizing Nanoparticles through Nanoindentation” as part of Symposium SS: Properties and Processes at the Nanoscale – Nanomechanics of Material Behavior, one of the meeting’s largest symposia, which features 80 oral presenters and 120 poster presentations. He was the only undergraduate student who gave a talk in this session.

“We are so proud of Billy. It is highly competitive to be selected as an MRS oral presenter because most are internationally well-established researchers, and their presentations focus on leading-edge materials research with great impacts,” says Dr. Gang Feng, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Albert’s adviser.

In his presentation, Albert discussed research he conducted over the summer as a Villanova Undergraduate Research fellow in 2011. Following Albert’s talk, several professors expressed their congratulations, including Prof. Maarten P. de Boer from Carnegie Mellon University and Session Chair of the symposium, and Dr. Robert J. Young, a distinguished professor from the University of Manchester and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. “Both presented the same day as Billy. In fact, Dr. Young asked, ‘Is he really an undergraduate? The talk is very impressive!’”

In addition to receiving research support from the Villanova Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, Albert also earned a Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship from the Department of Defense in 2011. He is currently working on summarizing the presented research and will submit his writing to an international journal in the coming months.