Materials science and engineering alum Arun Devaraj ('11 Ph.D.) received a 2020 Early Career Research Program award from the Department of Energy. The award comes with five years of research support totaling roughly $2.5 million.

At UNT, Devaraj studied experimental and computational material science under the advisement of Raj Banerjee, University Presidential and Regents professor, and Srinivasan Srivilliputhur, associate professor of materials science and engineering.

Now at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Devaraj will use the funds to explore how hydrogen, combined with stress and oxidation, leads to catastrophic failures of high-strength steels widely used in the nuclear and automotive industries.