Joshua Adkins joins department as Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate
Joshua Adkins earned his PhD in materials engineering from UIC in 2024 and is now joining CME as a Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate, where he will be supporting instruction of CME 260/261 as a guest lecturer and co-teacher.
In this role, he aims to spend the near future building the foundations for his career as a servant-scholar.
“For me, that means establishing and executing a competitive research program, contributing to the nurturing of UIC’s brilliant and diverse engineering student population, and growing my knowledge, skills, and expertise,” he said.
In addition to teaching, Adkins will conduct research with faculty members in the department and the College of Engineering focused on ferroelectricity – a property of certain materials to have a spontaneous polarization which can be reversed by the application of an external electric field – and related phenomena in complex oxide thin films grown via pulsed laser deposition.
“I’m specifically interested in studying how modifications to the atomic structure of materials via strain and doping affect their properties when they’re considered for applications like microelectronics and energy conversion,” he said. “At the same time, I’ll be exploring some of the cool variable-temperature physics associated with ferroelectrics so we can also understand how these materials will behave across a variety of environments and time scales.”
As the recipient of UIC’s Pipeline to an Inclusive Faculty Fellowship, Adkins was able to participate in several activities in tandem with his doctoral research. He also worked as a visiting student at Argonne National Laboratory during his doctoral studies and leveraged relationships across UIC’s campus to recruit, retain, and train students from various backgrounds.
“I’ve previously worked with units like the College of Engineering’s Equity and Inclusion in Engineering Program and the UIC CHANCE Program on strategies to develop our students’ engineering identities and create programming to enhance the potential for academic success for our incoming engineering students,” he said.
For his efforts, he was awarded UIC’s Chancellor’s Student Service Award and UIC’s College of Engineering Exceptional Teaching Promise Award.
“I believe there’s more to my identity as an academic professional than research alone. I’m privileged to be positioned to help train generations of future scientists and engineers. I take this privilege very seriously and constantly reflect on the ways in which I can intentionally leverage engineering research, teaching, and service to nurture critically conscious students who are willing and able to help engineer a more just and humane society,” he said.