HPMI Researcher and IME PhD candidate Margaret Scheiner was awarded the E. Wayne Kay Graduate Scholarship from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.

Applicants for the scholarship must be a full-time student with a minimum 3.0 GPA, who has been accepted in a graduate program for a Masters or Doctorate degree with a manufacturing or industrial engineering emphasis in the United States or Canada. Her selection was based upon scholastic ability, exemplary character and leadership capability, and potential for future leadership in the profession.

Margaret recently founded and serves as president of DreamOn, a student organization which aims to address the gender bias in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. She was inspired to become an engineer because she identified with STEM role models. Through DreamOn, she wants to bring role models to current students. “Every student has the potential to introduce new creativity to the world and to solve world-wide problems: they are tomorrow’s innovators,” she said.

Margaret is currently coordinating the activities of 14 interns supported by the National Science Foundation and Air Force Research Lab Research Experience for Undergraduates, who are working at the High-Performance Materials Institute. In line with her DreamOn goals, of the interns, five are female. Margaret is also an alumnus of the NSF REU program.

She said that her desire to protect the outdoors and the environment led her to pursue the development of renewable energy sources. The summer after her freshman year at Cornell University, she worked at the Ames Laboratory, funded by the Department of Energy, where she hand-manufactured dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs), tested them, and analyzed the data. The team she worked with published a manuscript in Langmuir showing doubled solar conversion efficiency with a prescribed set of surface treatments.

Now, as a PhD candidate in Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering, she is working to develop and characterize methods to manufacture self-healing composite materials utilizing DSC sensors.

After graduate school, she intends to pursue a career in academia as a research professor. In this role, she believes she will continue to conduct research in advanced composites with a focus on bio-inspired healing abilities. In addition, she wants to inspire students in the classroom, in the laboratory, and via local STEM outreach.