Takaaki Koyanagi, an R&D staff member with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has received the TMS Frontiers of Materials award. TMS, or The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, connects scientists and engineers working with minerals, metals and materials in industry, academia and government positions around the world.
The award is made competitively to a top-performing early career professional capable of organizing a Frontiers of Materials event focusing on a hot or emergent technical topic at the TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition. Koyanagi will organize a symposium at the next annual meeting, “Novel Ceramics Processes for Nuclear Applications,” in March 2024. Established in 2020, the award is given to three early career materials researchers annually.
Koyanagi, who has been at ORNL since he was a postdoctoral fellow in 2013, is part of the Radiation Effects and Microstructural Analysis group of the lab’s Materials Science and Technology Division. He focuses his research on the development and characterization of refractory materials and their composites for high-temperature and severe-environment applications, specifically the materials that could be used for nuclear fusion and fission applications.
He has also received DOE’s Office of Science Early Career Research Program award in 2023; the Global Star Award, Engineering Ceramics Division, of the American Ceramics Society in 2020; and the Masaji Yoshikawa Memorial Prize for Fusion Energy Award, Fusion Energy Forum of Japan, in 2022.
Koyanagi received his doctoral and master’s degrees in energy science and an undergraduate degree in engineering science from Kyoto University in Japan.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science. — Lawrence Bernard
