Joshua Willis Adkins
PIF Fellow
About
Joshua Willis Adkins (he/him/his) is a third-year doctoral student in the Materials Engineering program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He earned his B.S. in Chemistry from Xavier University of Louisiana, where he performed research on improving the performance and longevity of lithium-sulfur batteries with generous support from a multi-million-dollar NASA grant. His doctoral research is conducted under the supervision of Drs. Jeremiah Abiade and Saidur Bakaul, and involves the investigation of the temperature-, size- and dopant-mediated ferroelectric and ferromagnetic phenomena exhibited by complex oxide thin films grown via pulsed laser deposition. He currently holds a Visiting Student appointment at Argonne National Laboratory and is a UIC Pipeline to an Inclusive Faculty (PIF) Fellow. He also serves on UIC’s Black Graduate Student Association Committee on Outreach and Mentorship, where he assists with the development and administration of a multidisciplinary mentoring program targeted towards Black undergraduate and graduate students.