Colleen Murray Wins Award at Regional SAMPE Symposium

graduate students

University of Maryland graduate student Colleen Murray won the poster competition at the New Jersey Chapter of the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (NJ SAMPE) 2023 Regional Additive Manufacturing Symposium held June 22 at Rowan University in Glassboro, N. J.

Murray is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and is a graduate research assistant under the advisement of Department of Aerospace Engineering Professor Norman Wereley in the Composites Research (CORE) Laboratory.

She received her bachelors in mechanical engineering in 2019 and master’s in materials science in 2020 from the University of Delaware. Her research focuses on the energy absorption capabilities of additively manufactured honeycomb and lattices and syntactic foams for use in crashworthiness applications.

Her winning poster research was work done out of a partnership between CORE and RePliForm Inc.—a Baltimore-based company—to improve the mechanical properties of additively manufactured lattices.

“RePliForm has a method for plating brittle resins with a thin layer of ductile metal to improve the crashworthiness and energy absorption characteristics under low velocity impacts,” explained Murray. “We wanted to develop a process to improve the performance of these materials when they are exposed to low-speed crashes.”

After completing her Ph.D., Colleen plans to continue her research on the mechanical characterization of composite materials, while teaching.

Published June 30, 2023