Samuel Clay Ursu, a senior in metallurgical and materials engineering and participant in the Accelerated Master’s Program (AMP), was selected by the Microscopy Society of America (MSA) to receive their 2026 scholarship for undergraduate research.
For more than 25 years, the scholarship has supported the educational and research potential of typically three to five full-time undergraduate students per year who are interested in pursuing microscopy as a career or major research tool. Guided by his advisor Dr. Klaus van Benthem, Ursu will study electric field effects on grain boundary structures and grain growth behavior in aluminum enriched NiO ceramics. He will leverage the world-class characterization tools at the Alabama Materials Institute to study materials defects and their chemical compositions atom-by-atom.
Pictured at the top are Clay Ursu and Dr. Klaus van Benthem in front of the ThermoFisher Spectra 300 UX scanning transmission electron microscope.