The Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of Tennessee is pleased to announce the arrival of Dr. Orlando Rios as an assistant professor in the MSE department, effective August 1, 2020. Dr. Rios is installing his laboratory at the Joint Institute of Advanced Materials and will have an office in both JIAM and in Ferris Hall. During a decade as a staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Dr. Rios was active in a wide variety of materials discovery projects. One research project that he is continuing at UTK is the development of Aluminum-Cerium alloys. Over the summer, Dr. Rios was successful in having UTK added as a partner to the Critical Materials Institute of the U.S. Department of Energy, which is led out of Ames Laboratory. For information about the CMI, please visit https://www.ameslab.gov/cmi. Dr. Rios is leading two CMI tasks at UTK. The first involves research to enable Al-Ce Alloy in diverse value chain products and the second involves developing and assessing Al-Ce alloys that are fully recyclable. The CMI is supporting Dr. Rios effort with a three-year grant.
While at ORNL, Dr. Rios collaborated with faculty at UTK and both directed the dissertations of doctoral students in the Bredesen center and sat on the doctoral committees of students in the MSE department. He has been working this summer to have a new team of students, post-doctoral researchers and staff in place at UTK to hit the ground running this fall. As his first course at UTK, he will teach the Principles of Polymeric Materials to MSE juniors. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Rios to the UTK MSE community.
