Alfred University student wins Young Scholars Award from ACerS
Patrick Lynch, a glass engineering science major at Alfred University, has been named winner of the 2024 Alfred R. Cooper Young Scholars Award, given by the Glass and Optical Materials Division of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS).
The undergraduate award is named in honor of the late Professor Alfred R. Cooper, Jr., member of the faculty at Case Western Reserve University and a prominent contributor to the understanding of many glass phenomena and glass problems.
The Cooper Scholars Award is presented to Lynch—a Long Island resident who will be a senior at Alfred University this fall—for his undergraduate glass research entitled “Accelerated Structural Relaxation of Chalcogenide Glasses via Thermo-Ultrasonication.” Lynch said he has been working in Assistant Professor of Ceramic Engineering Myungkoo Kang’s Advanced Optical Ceramics group, conducting research in chalcogenide glasses, which are a key component of many different infrared acquisition, guidance, and sensing systems.
Kang and Lynch co-authored a paper on self-healing glass, titled “Self-healing mechanisms for Ge-Sb-S chalcogenide glasses upon gamma irradiation,” which appeared in the April 17 issue of the Material Research Society (MRS) Bulletin. Alfred University alumna Kathleen Richardson, ’82, MS ’88, PhD ’92, Pegasus Professor of Optics and Materials Science at the University of Central Florida and a member of Alfred University’s Board of Trustees, was also a co-author on the paper.
The purpose of the Cooper Scholars Award is to encourage and recognize undergraduate students who have demonstrated excellence in research, engineering, and/or study in glass science or technology. The award will be presented during the Glass and Optical Materials Division Cooper Session at the Materials Science and Technology annual meeting, to be held Oct. 6-9 in Pittsburgh, PA, during which time Lynch will be invited to present a talk on his research.