Prize Recipient

Moureen C. Kemei
California Institute of Technology

"For employing advanced characterization tools to gain new insights into the structure and electronic properties of magnetic materials."

Moureen Kemei received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics from Mount Holyoke College in 2010. She then joined the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) where she studied the coupling of spin interactions to the structure of oxides of the spinel family under the guidance of Professor Ram Seshadri. While at UCSB, Moureen was supported by the Schlumberger Faculty for the Future fellowship. She extensively applied variable-temperature high-resolution synchrotron x-ray diffraction techniques developed at Argonne National Laboratory to understand spin-driven structural phase transitions in spinels and she received her PhD for this work in 2014. Moureen is currently a Resnick Institute Post-doctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology where she is studying oxides for thermochemical cycling and examining the local structure of solid oxide fuel cell materials in Professor Sossina Haile’s group.