Arun Devaraj (’11 Ph.D.), a materials science and engineering graduate, received the 2020 Early Career Research Program award from the U.S. Department of Energy. Now a materials scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, he will use the five-year, $2.5 million award to explore how the combination of hydrogen, stress and oxidation can result in the failures of high-strength steels that are used in nuclear and automotive industries. He hopes to develop strategies so metal alloys are designed to withstand extreme corrosion, stress and high temperatures. While at UNT, Devaraj studied experimental and computational materials science with his mentor Regents Professor Raj Banerjee and associate professor Srinivasan Srivilliputhur, both from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. For his thesis, he studied the phase transformation of titanium alloys, which are used to decrease the weight in automobiles, and correlated the experimental results with theoretical computation.