MSE Alumni Highlights

Professor Claudia Rawn is an avid outdoors person and has been on some spectacular hikes, but her journey along her career pathway has been equally amazing!

Claudia is currently a professor in the Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) and serves as the director and scientific leader for the Core Diffraction Facility located at the Institute of Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (IAMM) on the Cherokee Campus.  For the last eleven years she served as the director of the Center for Materials Processing, a Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC) Center of Excellence. Her research interests include investigations of crystal structures, phase transitions, and thermophysical properties of materials using in-situ x-ray and neutron diffraction. This year Claudia was part of an impressive team that was awarded a prestigious $18 million NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) and just started serving as the deputy center director and director of education and Diversity of the Center of Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (CAMM).  

Her pathway to becoming a professor was non-traditional as prior even starting her Ph.D. here at the University of Arizona, Claudia worked in the Ceramics Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a materials research engineer studying the phase equilibria of high Tc superconductor systems. After completing her Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of professor Dunbar Birnie, she held postdoctoral research positions in the Ceramics Department of the "Jozef Stefan" Institute (IJS), in Ljubljana, Slovenia and Materials Science and Technology Division at ORNL.  Claudia quickly advanced through the ranks at ORNL and was a senior research staff member in the Diffraction and Thermophysical Properties Group and a joint faculty member in the MSE Department at UTK prior to joining the University of Tennessee full-time in 2014.