Alessia Mezzadrelli (ESR 2) started her first secondment

Alessia Mezzadrelli (Early-Stage Researcher 2, ESR 2) arrived last december in Corning, NY, where she will be living over the next six months to carry out her first secondment within the NANO-GLASS project at Corning Incorporated’s Sullivan Park Research and Development facility.

Alessia’s secondment is aimed at developing an experimental procedure to obtain transparent glass surfaces with multifunctional properties. The glass samples will be fabricated in a cleanroom at Sullivan Park. Here, Alessia is being trained by Corning’s scientists and technologists. Initially, she will be focusing on ultrathin films of metals to obtain novel properties – for example, antimicrobial characteristics combined with high optical transparency.

During her first days at the facility, Alessia has met face-to-face with her supervisors Todd St Clair, Prantik Mazumder, and Wageesha Senaratne to discuss the next steps of her Individual Research Project (IRP).

“I’m thrilled to work within the R&D department at Corning,” Alessia said. “I am sure it will be a fruitful experience as I’ll be able to work with several people with different scientific backgrounds. I’ll try to increase my knowledge in the nanofabrication fields involved in my project with a particular attention to the sputtering process of different materials. Besides that, the dewetting technique is playing a key-role in the optimization of these surfaces so I will hopefully find inspiration to find new combined solutions.”

In New York, Alessia has also met the other two NANO-GLASS ESRs, Iliyan Karadzhov (ESR1) and Susana Plascencia (ESR4), who are already fulfilling their own secondments at Corning. Iliyan started his secondment last July while Susana did so last November.