Jamie Warner, the Hayden Head Centennial Professor in Mechanical Engineering, has been appointed as the new director of the Texas Materials Institute, effective July 1, 2022. The Texas Materials Institute is a joint research center of the Cockrell School and the College of Natural Sciences that also administers the materials science and engineering graduate program.
Warner joined the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering in January 2020 to lead the new Electron Microscopy Facility, which is located in the Engineering Education and Research Center and operates under the Texas Materials Institute. During this time, the facility has seen the installation of the world’s most advanced direct electron detectors for electron imaging and spectroscopy, combined with state-of-the-art cryogenic sample preparation and handling of delicate materials. This new facility places UT Austin at the global forefront of atomic-scale materials characterization and is set to underpin future groundbreaking discoveries in clean-energy storage and generation, water purification and quantum technology.
Prior to coming to UT, Warner spent 13 years in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, where he was professor of materials and led the Nanostructured Materials Group. His research focuses on the next generation of nanostructured materials with unique properties that will impact electronic, opto-electronic, quantum and energy applications. He completed his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Queensland in 2004 and then spent 18 months as a postdoc in New Zealand and Australia, before moving to the Department of Materials at Oxford in November 2006. He has more than 300 peer-reviewed publications to his name, with 170 as the corresponding author. These include papers in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications, Nano Letters, Advanced Materials and ACS Nano, pertaining to topics such as nanomaterials for opto-electronics, energy, bio-applications, and quantum materials.
Arumugam “Ram” Manthiram, a professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, served as TMI director institute for the last 11 years. Since 2011, he has significantly grown TMI and its research programs, as well as the materials science and engineering graduate program. Manthiram will continue to lead his Manthiram Laboratory, focusing on the design and development of materials for energy conversion and storage.
