Some people seek perfection. UC Santa Barbara materials professor Daniel Gianola, recently received three prestigious awards for his research, which has been focused on creating, finding, and exploring imperfections, with an eye to developing new and better materials.

“Our work is all about the imperfections — defects —  because they control a material’s properties, so we want to be able to see them and their dynamics, and that's what we do in the microscope,” Gianola said.

He received the 2026 Brimacombe Medal from The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS). Brimacombe medals are bestowed upon outstanding members of the materials community, and  Gianola was recognized for “innovation in in situ electron microscopy and the micromechanics of crystal defects, as well as for his dedicated service to TMS programming.”

Those accolades are echoed in the announcements of the other two awards, both from institutions in Germany: the 2026 Alexander von Humboldt Fraunhofer-Bessel Research Award and the 2026 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) International Excellence Fellow. 

Since 1972, the Bessel Research Award has been “conferred to internationally known researchers from any discipline in recognition of their entire academic record to date,” read the announcement. He is also “invited to carry out research projects of his own choice in cooperation with specialist colleagues in Germany.” 

“Excellence relies on exchange among the best researchers worldwide,” read the award announcement for the International Excellence Fellowship, given by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). That program “is intended to intensify international collaboration with top-level universities and research institutions, and to help researchers — from both KIT and abroad — to continue existing work and initiate new scientific partnerships and projects, read a letter of announcement. As a fellow, it added, Gianola “will be given privileged access to the scientific, administrative, and social infrastructure of KIT and enjoy comprehensive personal support.” In July, Gianola will begin a sabbatical at KIT.

“I’m profoundly honored by these awards, which, I like to think, validate years spent with my students, postdocs, and collaborators joyfully trying to understand the tiniest features in materials that stubbornly refuse to behave,” Gianola said. 

Referring to the TMS honor, he said, “TMS was the first conference I attended as a graduate student, and the enthusiasm, community, and scientific curiosity I encountered within the TMS community have inspired me ever since, thanks in no small part to my mentors, collaborators, and group members who have trusted me, challenged me, and shaped my career. To now receive this recognition from an organization that has given me both direction and improbable adventures feels a bit like discovering that the answer to the ultimate question of materials behavior is, delightfully, to keep exploring.”

“Realizing the countless materials-based technologies that have been developed at UCSB and elsewhere requires a deep understanding of the structure of a material and how it informs its unique characteristics and capacities — a continuous learning process,” said Umesh Mishra, dean of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering at UCSB. “Dan Gianola’s lab has helped not only to expand the capacity of existing characterization tools — especially in the realm of electron microscopy — but also the development of new ones used in such research. He richly deserves these honors, and we at the COE offer him both our sincere congratulations and our gratitude for his key role in making possible so many advances in materials science and engineering.”

Gianola has for years focused his research on characterizing materials across many length scales, including down to the atomic level, especially materials applied in extreme environments, such as components for jet engines and lightweight transportation.

The phrase “materials that stubbornly refuse to behave,” Gianola said “is a general statement, but it gets at the core tenet of materials science, which is to elucidate the relationships among structure and property, which, in turn allows materials scientists to design and synthesize new materials to meet the demands of next-generation technologies. 

“The idea is that, if you control the structure, you control the properties. Still, sometimes a material does things you don’t expect it to do. For instance, we might engineer a microstructure in a material. We might choose a certain chemistry and try to get it to form second phases, little particles, or precipitates, or to have a defect population, and then we say, ‘Great, that's the perfect template for the best combination of strong, high-temperature resistance and also damage tolerance.’ Then, we put it in the microscope, and it cracks like crazy. But that is progress; we often learn as much from the failures that we do from the successes, allowing us to take the next steps. We also are often completely surprised and get serendipitous results, or see something unusual happen, because we’re watching the defects dynamically in the microscope. Those surprises can lead us into fertile new territory for exploration.”

One such area, and one, Gianola has been working with materials colleague Professor Tresa Pollock, who said, “Dan is an international leader in advancing these new characterization modalities and joins a list of the most distinguished scholars in the materials field in receiving the Brimcombe Award.” Lately, Gianola said, “We have been really excited about adapting the latest electron-camera technology, incorporating what is called a direct electron detector  — to a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Until recently, the camera had been used only in very expensive transmission electron microscopes (TEMs) but never in the less-expensive SEMs. 

Gianola had an idea to try to get the best camera into the SEM platform and called a couple of companies about it. Some responded with a lot of hesitation given that the camera is nearly as expensive as the microscope. “Then, we called Direct Electron, a company in San Diego, and they were willing to give it a shot,” he said. “We've been pursuing really interesting work with them in the six or so years since.” 

Gianola explained that these cameras were made possible by the development of a radiation-hard sensor, which eliminated the need to first convert electrons to visible light through a phosphorescent screen, the standard commercially available solution to date. “This new generation of camera makes it possible to detect and count every electron that hits the detector, thus providing super-high sensitivity and the ability to go really fast and get all the characteristics of what's happening, he said.”

People sometimes think of the SEM as inferior to the TEM, because, according to Gianola, “It costs less and is easier to use but doesn’t have the spatial resolution of a TEM or access to all of the scattering signals. Very few people thought to tune things to the energies of the SEM platform, but with the new detectors, an SEM can produce results with information that would normally require a TEM.”

Direct Electron, which makes the cameras, is now commercializing the detector, which had to be redesigned for an SEM. “It has been super-fun to see it go from just a crazy idea to a prototype and, now, to one that looks more like a packaged product,” noted Gianola. 

Seeking, inserting — and wanting — the imperfections in a material is an age-old interest of materials scientists and engineers. Treating the defects and their chemical and structural microenvironment as objects to design, however, represents a relatively new paradigm in materials science. “Only in the past ten years or so have people begun talking about defect phases,” Gianola said, “and now they are a big part of what we're after, treating defects as the basis for creating new materials or characteristics we wouldn't get otherwise in the bulk material. It's the imperfections that are so important, and, just as in humans, they're what make the materials interesting.” 

They are also what earn researchers like him prestigious awards.