Adele Moatti, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering from Prof. Jagdish Narayan’s group, received the Oral Presentation Award for the organized symposium on “Frontiers in Advanced Functional Thin Films and Nanostructured Materials” in TMS annual conference 2018. Her work was on Kinetic Modeling of Structural Transitions in VO2 Thin Films. This work holds high importance in advancing strongly-correlated VO2 technology where the simultaneous occurrence of electrical (insulator to metal) and structural (monoclinic to tetragonal) transitions directly affect the endurance and lifetime of thermal switches and sensors. This approach significantly increases the opportunity to generate ultrafast devices since there is an order of magnitude difference between the rate of occurrence of the structural and electrical transitions. This work, which was funded by National Science Foundation funding (DMR-1304607), could lead to faster applications – such as infrared sensors with military uses. The work has been also published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.7b05620).