Sebastian Kube Wins Acta Award

Sebastian A. Kube, a recent Ph.D. graduate in Materials Science, has won an Acta Student Award for his article "Metastability in high entropy alloys”, published in Scripta Materialia.

The annual Acta Award is made by the prestigious, peer-reviewed group of Acta Journals. The award includes a $2,000 grant and honors graduate students whose work demonstrates exceptional value to the Materials community and who hold great potential for future leadership.

Kube’s research aims to understand new classes of complex alloys. These exhibit complex physics, which must be understood in detail to engineer new useful materials. Also, they cover vast composition spaces, in which it would take millions of years to test all the promising element combinations and concentration ratios using conventional methods. 

“To overcome this obstacle, we combine experimental metallurgical techniques and automation tools to study and characterize new alloys up to a thousand times faster,” Kube says. “This has allowed me to generate large amounts of data, which reveal alloy behavior on a much bigger scale. We then employ advanced data science methods to discover new patterns. During my time at Yale, I have studied over 25,000 new alloys and investigated a wide range of complex behavior, such as phase stability, nanocrystalline stability, glass forming ability, and liquid viscosity and fragility.”

For the past five years, Kube has conducted this research under the supervision of Prof. Jan Schroers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. In October, Kube will move on to UC Santa Barbara as postdoctoral scholar, joining the research group of Prof. Tresa Pollock, who is a leader in the field of high-temperature alloys.