Department of Materials Science and Engineering Earns Top UC Davis Safety Awards
Safety Services’ Safety Star for the third quarter of 2025 is awarded to Bill Doering, the undergraduate lab manager and department safety coordinator for the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Chemical Engineering.
The award recognizes his exceptional dedication to supporting senior design students and maintaining a safe, well-organized lab environment.
The Takamura Research Lab, led by Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Yayoi Takamura, has received the 2025 Grand Prize for Lab Safety from the University of California, Davis, Safety Services.
The award recognizes labs across UC Davis schools and colleges for their strong safety emphasis and their actions to embody the Safety Services slogan, “Think Safe. Act Safe. Be Safe.” Each year, Safety Services recognizes one lab from each college or school, with one lab earning the top award and a $6,000 cash prize.
The Takamura Research Lab focuses on discovering new magnetic materials, exploring how their structures can be designed and controlled at the smallest scales. The team uses pulsed laser deposition, a technique that allows them to build artificial layered materials composed of stacks of materials with individual thicknesses only a few atoms thick.
By studying both ferromagnetic (like the magnets you might find on a refrigerator) and antiferromagnetic (whose internal magnetic fields cancel each other out) materials, the lab seeks to identify new materials that can be utilized in neuromorphic computing, a new approach to electronics that mimics the energy efficiency of the human brain.
“A safety culture is a foundational aspect of working in the lab,” Takamura said.
Given the hazards they work with, including X-rays, Class IV lasers, cryogens, toxic gases and reproductive toxins, strict procedures are set in place to ensure members are safe, knowledgeable and supported in the lab. Students undergo extensive initial training, contribute to the writing and revising of standard operating procedures, and participate in refreshers during group meetings.
Takamura also emphasizes that members should not just simply memorize safety rules but understand why each step is necessary and what could happen if procedures are ignored.
These rigorous policies establish an organized and proactive lab environment.
“Professor Takamura’s laboratory spaces immediately stand out, as they are always extremely clean and organized,” said Bill Doering, the department safety coordinator for the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Chemical Engineering, who also received a Safety Star this quarter (see sidebar). “It doesn’t take long to realize that this culture starts with [Professor] Takamura, who actively trains her students to understand that safety comes first.”
Doering praised Takamura’s emphasis on asking questions and not rushing results at the cost of safety, adding that strong graduate student lab safety coordinators have also helped keep the lab’s culture self-sustaining due to their responsibility for regular lab upkeep, training and safety documentation.
Looking ahead, Takamura’s group plans to explore how these magnetic materials behave when created at the nanoscale, where their properties can change in unexpected ways. They also hope to collaborate with theorists and computational scientists to use modeling and machine learning in material discovery, opening the door to technologies that affect everything from computing power to everyday devices.
