Reno Reporter

A third year student at University of Nevada, Reno recently took the top poster award in the 2022 Technical Division Student Poster Competition.

UNR undergrad Sydney Fields worked closely for months with her faculty mentor Yufeng Zheng to prepare for The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society 2022 Annual Meeting & Exhibition in Anaheim which would be her first conference, the university's publication Nevada Today said.  

“It was the first time I've been to any sort of professional conference, so I was very nervous at first, but everyone there is nice and obviously incredibly smart, and I met quite a lot of people from not just the U.S., but from London and Norway, and it was just very interesting to meet all these people,” Fields said. 

The partnership between Zheng and Fields began when Fields, who was already working on Materials Design and Characterization Group in the College of Engineering, was asked by the assistant professor if she had any interest in applying for the Nevada Undergraduate Research Award.

“We decided together to submit my research to a poster conference,” Fields said. “So, I had weekly or biweekly meetings with him, and we would go over everything. Then, I created presentations and we would discuss it. I feel like that was so incredibly helpful and he really helped me do my best.”

As a recipient of the award, she'll receive resources to pursue her research into the effect certain heat treatments has on the microstructure of a titanium alloy. Her research project, “Quantitative Analysis of Microstructure in the Ti-6Al-4V Alloy Using Scanning Electron Microscopy” will have applications in the aerospace industry, Nevada Today said.