07/20/2026 – Dean’s Visit
College of Engineering Dean Devesh Ranjan and Associate Dean Oliver Schmitz visit our lab for a tour of AlloyBot.
07/02/2026 – Beyond Nickel Based Superalloys V Conference in Birmingham, UK
What a great week spent together with many of our high temperature materials colleagues in Birmingham! Special thanks to lead organizer Prof. Sandy Knowles for making this gathering a success.
06/09/2026 – ARPA-E IGNIITE Director’s Award
Sebastian earns inaugural ARPA-E IGNIITE Director’s Award from the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy, recognizing the significant technological promise of our “AlloyBot” project and providing extended support beyond the original INGIITE 2024 early career award.
05/15/2026 – Celebrating a successful Spring semester together!
Lots of accomplishments to share:
- Vignesh has been selected as a recipient for the College of Engineering Award for Post-Doctorate Mentoring and Service-Honorable Mention, celebrating his profound impact as mentor and teacher in our research group and the college.
- Print successfully defended his Masters thesis and is graduating as a freshly baked Badger Engineer.
- We presented the first research output from our new research group at the TMS2026 conference, at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation summit, and published the corresponding preprint entitled “AlloyBot: On-Demand Synthesis of Bulk Alloys by Automatic Arc-Melting“.
Congratulations, Team!
12/14/2025 – Happy Holidays!
…at -20°C. And welcome Ming En to our group. It’s time to oxidize!
10/01/2025 – DARPA Young Faculty Award
Sebastian earns the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Young Faculty Award.
This award from the US Department of Defense will allow us to develop an autonomous testing platform that uses robotics, automation and artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery process for new oxidation-resistant alloys. These advanced materials have applications in turbines, jet engines, rocket nozzles, nuclear reactors, high-speed aerospace vehicles, and beyond.
08/21/2025
Congratulations to Ashika Bhatta on the successful completion of her Masters in our group.
08/15/2025 – DoE early career award
Sebastian earns the DoE Early Career Research Program (ECRP) award.
This award from the US Department of Energy will allow us to investigate what controls the viscosity of metallic liquids, as well as its temperature dependence known as “liquid fragility”, and the impact this property has on the solidification behavior of alloys.
05/15/2025 – First year celebration.
We have completed our first year together as a group!
01/01/2025 – New year, new beginnings.
Ashika Bhatta and Vignesh Selvaraj join our group for a deep dive into alloy design and discovery. Welcome to the team!
08/15/2024 – Welcome Anagh and Print!
Anagh Dutta and Pakorn (Print) Boonpetch join the group and embark on their research journey. Welcome to Madison!
07/02/2024 – ARPA-E IGNIITE Award
Sebastian earns the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy’s (ARPA-E) IGNIITE early career award.
This award from US Department of Energy will support our autonomous laboratory platform “AlloyBot”, which uses robotics, automation and AI to rapidly optimize new structural alloys for the extreme operating conditions found in energy and propulsion applications.
04/01/2024 – Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories
Sebastian is selected as Scialog Fellow for Automating Chemical Laboratories by RCSA (Research Corporation for Science Advancement).
Read more:
01/01/2024 – First day!
Sebastian joins UW-Madison’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
