Please join the Department of Materials Science & Engineering for the John E. Hilliard Symposium on Wednesday, May 20th at Chambers Hall.

This all-day event highlights the research of senior graduate students and those completing an Honors Senior Thesis.

Location: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster St. Evanston, IL

Keynote speakerGrace WangDeputy Assistant Director for Engineering, National Science Foundation (NSF)Abstract From transistors to the internet, many breakthrough technologies and concepts in the past have changed the way we work, communicate, and live. While these advances frequently seem to have originated serendipitously, they result from brilliant connections across disciplinary, organizational, and industry-sector boundaries. With the global percentage of U.S. R&D investment continuously decreasing in the last decade, we are facing ever increasing global competition. At the same time, the projected population growth and the aging population in coming years drives the demand for food, water, energy, healthcare, education, and security. To address these problems in this funding climate, one might ask: (1) How to stimulate more innovative thinking to enable engineering solutions to help address these challenges; (2) How to prepare students for the future engineering jobs, some of which do not even exist yet? I discuss these challenges and describe how past successes to enable and capitalize breakthrough technologies and concepts may provide new answers.

Biography Grace Wang was named Deputy Assistant Director for Engineering at the National Science Foundation in July 2014. Prior to that, Grace was the Division Director of the Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships (IIP) at NSF since February of 2012. Grace joined NSF in June 2009 as a Program Director for the SBIR/STTR Program. She also served as the Cluster Leader for the Nanotechnology, Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (NM) Cluster in SBIR/STTR Program. Before joining NSF, Grace was a Senior Development Scientist at Hitachi, where she led a team to successfully develop and launch a few generations of products into the market. While in Hitachi, Grace also led task forces both in the US and overseas that identified and executed effective and viable solutions to major technical crises, and helped mitigate impact on revenue generation. Grace started her career as an Advisory Development Scientist at IBM. Grace is the recipient of many leadership and technical achievement awards. Grace holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University.