Kourkoutis

Lena Kourkoutis, assistant professor of applied and engineering physics, has received a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The five-year, $875,000 award has gone to 18 of the nation’s most innovative early-career scientists and engineers, the foundation says. Established in 1988, the fellowships provide early-career scientists with flexible funding and freedom to take risks and explore new frontiers in their fields.

Kourkoutis, a Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, studies new functionalities that emerge at the interfaces of materials. Her electron microscopy group develops techniques to understand such phenomena in complex oxides, a class of materials that exhibits a rich variety of properties that are unattainable in conventional semiconductors.

To date, the foundation has awarded $346 million to support 523 scientists and engineers from 52 top national universities.