UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Susan Sinnott, professor and head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State, will deliver the John F. McMahon Memorial Lecture at Alfred University at 11:20 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 2, in Holmes Auditorium, Harder Hall. Sinnott’s talk is titled “Atomistic Simulations to Advance Surface Science.”
The John F. McMahon Memorial Lecture Award is presented annually to an outstanding ceramic engineer. The award was created by Alfred University alumni in honor of the late John F. McMahon, an alumnus, a professor and finally, dean of what is now the Inamori School of Engineering.
“I am deeply honored to give the McMahon Lecture at Alfred University, and I am looking forward to sharing information about my work in computational materials science,” said Sinnott, who also holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Chemistry at Penn State.
Sinnott’s presentation will focus on third-generation charge-optimized many-body (COMB3) potentials. COMB3 was developed to enable an atomic-scale description of systems that include combinations of metallic, ionic, and covalent bonding under the same framework.
Her presentation will provide an overview of the COMB3 potential and illustrate its utility in the study of water-metal surface and nanoparticle interactions, the examination of carbon nanoparticle-metal surface interactions, and the mechanisms associated with the growth of metal films on metallic and oxide substrates.
Sinnott earned a bachelor of science in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin and a doctorate in physical chemistry from Iowa State University. She went on to be a National Research Council postdoctoral associate at the Naval Research Laboratory.
She began her career in academia in 1995 as an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Kentucky (UK). During this time, she received the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award in Engineering and the UK College of Engineering Tau Beta Pi and Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award, Materials Program in 1996 and 1998.
Sinnott moved to the University of Florida (UF) in 2000, where she was an associate professor, professor and alumni professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. While at UF, she received the UF Florida Faculty Excellence Award on five separate occasions, was a UF Research Foundation Professor and Florida Blue Key Distinguished Professor and received the UF College of Engineering Doctoral Dissertation Mentoring Award and the UF College of Engineering Teacher/Scholar of the Year Award.
In 2015 Sinnott moved to Penn State, where her accomplishments were recognized in 2022 with a Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal in Physical Sciences, the University of Michigan Department of Materials Science and Engineering Van Vlack Lecturer Award, and the American Vacuum Society (AVS) Medard W. Welch Award (as only the second woman to be awarded this top AVS award since 1970).
Sinnott is the author of more than 290 technical publications and is a fellow of the Materials Research Society, American Physical Society, American Ceramic Society, American Vacuum Society, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a professional Member of the New York Academy of Science, a past president of the American Vacuum Society, and the editor-in-chief of Computational Materials Science.