IE PhD Student Moataz Abdulhafez captures Best Poster Award at ASME MSEC Conference

Moataz-Mostafa Best Paper Award

Research investigating graphene production at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering was recently recognized at the 2021 ASME Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference (MSEC).

Moataz Abdulhafez, a fifth-year PhD student in the Swanson School’s Department of Industrial Engineering, received the conference’s Best Poster Award for his work, titled “Direct laser-induced nanocarbon formation on flexible polymers: Tailoring porous and fibrous morphologies.” Abdulhafez works in the NanoProduct of his advisor, Assistant Professor Mostafa Bedewy.

“When I started working on graphene fabrication using lasers, I realized that we can create a large variety of types of graphene-related nanomaterials,” said Abdulhafez. “Hence, we started to investigate how to tune our process to deliberately create each of these different morphologies and eventually identified the abrupt transitions that happen at specific combination of parameters, which was really exciting.”

“In our lab we focus on advanced manufacturing and materials engineering at the nano-scale, and Moataz has developed a unique approach for spatiotemporal control of the laser process to enable creating different types of graphene-based nanomaterials on the same flexible substrate,” Bedewy explained. “His research enabled unprecedented control on morphology and chemistry in laser-induced graphene fabrication. This may have tremendous impact on the scalable manufacturing of flexible devices with tailored graphene having distinctive and desired properties.”