STLE Section Awards Scholarship to Drexel University Doctoral Student
L-R: STLE Scholarship Committee member Bill Tuszynski and Awardee Sankalp Kota
The Philadelphia Section of the STLE is pleased to award a scholarship to Sankalp Kota, a doctoral student in Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University.
Working under the direction of Prof. Michel Barsoum, Kota is studying the manufacture and properties of atomically-layered MAX -phase like Transition Metal Boride (TMB) ceramics. The most promising is MoAlB, which is stable for over 200 hours at 1,300 °C. This represents the first known oxidation resistant transition metal boride. These represent a potential new class of tribomaterials as they also exhibit high compressive strengths, hardness and wear resistance. This work was featured in the November 2016 issue of TLT.
Since 2016, Kota has published four peer-reviewed papers as first or co-first author and has been a co-author on twenty other publications. In addition to conducting his own research, Kota has also mentored six undergraduate students in the Barsoum lab.