2013 Simon Karecki Award Presented to Kyle Doudrick and Xioyan Liao

The 2013 Simon Karecki Awards were presented at the GRC Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Environmentally Benign Semiconductor Manufacturing Review in Tucson, Arizona. The 2013 Simon Karecki Award was presented to Kyle Doudrick of Arizona State University. Xiaoyan Liao of the University of Arizona received Honorable Mention.  This is the twelfth presentation of the SRC Education Alliance Simon Karecki Award. This Award is given in memory of Dr. Simon Karecki who was a student in this Center and an SRC Fellow. Friends and colleagues of Simon have come together to create the Simon Karecki Fellowship Fund in memory of an outstanding individual and researcher to encourage other talented young researchers in the pursuit of environmental research.

Kyle is pursuing a Ph.D in Environmental Engineering at Arizona State University working under the faculty direction of Dr. Paul Westerhoff. The bulk of Kyle’s Ph.D. research has been on treating nitrate polluted waters. Managing the nitrogen cycle is one of the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges. He is also developing methods for detecting these nanomaterials in environmental matrices and is part of the team working on the SRC project “Detection of Engineered Nanomaterials: Semi-Conductor Facilities and Consumer Devices”.

In addition, Kyle has a strong record of service, leadership and team-building. Throughout his undergraduate and graduate studies, he has taken leadership positions in student organizations including President of the Association of Graduate Civil Engineers at Arizona State University, where he organized community outreach events related to engineering, including trail rehabilitations and cleanups, assisted with the departmental open house for recruitment of new graduate students, and wrote a monthly newsletter for the organization. In the lab, Kyle has been a mentor to three visiting scholars, four undergraduate students (including two senior projects), and has been integral in training new graduate students. Kyle will complete his doctoral studies in 2013.

Xiaoyan is pursuing her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering at the University of Arizona under the direction of Professor Ara Philipossian. Her passion to integrate her research with her strong sense of environmental citizenship started off 13 years ago when she selected environmental engineering as her major for her BS degree. Since then she has applied the ‘environment, health and safety’ ideals in her subsequent work as evidenced by her lengthy list of publications. In addition, she has demonstrated her serious approach towards health and safety by becoming an active member of the Chemical and Environmental Engineering Department’s Safety Committee. In this capacity, she has participated in audits of all of the department’s PI’s laboratories, issued corrective action lists and followed up on the progress of the audits. During the past four years, Xiaoyan has focused her research on two SRC projects; “Fundamentals of Advanced Planarization: Pad Micro-Texture, Pad Conditioning, Slurry Flow, and Retaining Ring Geometry” and “'Pad-in-a-Bottle': Planarization with Slurries Containing Suspended Polyurethane Beads”. Xiaoyan will complete her doctoral studies in late 2013.