Prof. Dr. Jincheng Du currently serves as a University Distinguished Research Professor and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Ceramics from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2004. He subsequently worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and later as a research associate at the University of Virginia. He joined the MSE Department of UNT as a faculty member in 2007 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2012 and to Professor in 2017. He currently serves as the Associate Department Chair for Graduate Studies of the MSE Department of UNT. Dr. Du’s research expertise lies in atomistic computer simulations of glass, ceramics, and nanostructured materials. He is the Chair of the Technical Committee on atomistic simulation and modeling of glasses of the International Commission of Glass (ICG).
Dr. Melanie Ecker currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Principal Investigator of the Ecker Lab – Smart Polymers for Biomedical Applications (SPBA). She is also the academic advisor for the UNT BMES student organization. She is originally from Germany, where she studied Chemistry at the Freie Universität Berlin and pursued her Ph.D. research on shape memory polymers at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) under Dr. Pretsch before she moved to the US. Her research interests mainly include shape memory polymer, polymer, biomaterials, neural interfaces, and biomedical devices.
