Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute

Walter Everett Voit was born in Cologne, Germany on August 26, 1982. He grew up in Ann Arbor, MI and Mt. Pleasant, SC. He also spent a year in Hobart, Tasmania. Dr. Voit attended Wando High School where he lettered in soccer and captained the Quiz Bowl team. He graduated valedictorian and attended the University of Texas at Dallas in the inaugural class of Eugene McDermott Scholars.

Dr. Voit spent two summers as an intern at Los Alamos National Labs as a computer scientist performing research in global grid computing for ocean modeling applications and bandwidth monitoring of the Linux kernel. He also worked for two and half years with Dallas nanotechnology startup company Zyvex, where he helped build custom scripts in python, C++, OpenGL, html and other languages and toolkits to manipulate precision instruments and visualize 3D MEMS constructions. Professor Voit received a B.S. in Computer Science in May 2005 and a Masters in Artificial Intelligence from UT Dallas in August 2006. Dr. Voit’s Master’s thesis work was conducted under the mentorship of I. Hal Sudborough where their team helped improve the upper bound of the pancake problem which has not been beaten since Gates and Papadimitriou published on the subject in 1979.

Dr. Voit performed his doctoral work under the guidance of Ken Gall. He cofounded Syzygy Memory Plastics in December 2007, has authored papers in top materials journals, is lead inventor on several patents and has helped secure over $400,000 of funding as a graduate student for his lab at Georgia Tech and for his company. Dr. Voit was named a Presidential Scholar at Georgia Tech and was selected to the prestigious TI:GER program, which is a partnership with the College of Management and Emory Law School.

Professor Voit began his faculty career June 1, 2010 as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas where he explores the thermomechanics of shape memory polymers. His company received a Phase II NSF SBIR in August 2010 on which UT Dallas was a subawardee. Prof. Voit was appointed treasurer and to the executive board of the Council of Ionizing Radiation Measurement Standards (CIRMS), and chaired a materials processing symposium at TMS in 2010. Prof. Voit received accolades for the most technically relevant presentation at the 9th Annual Ionizing Radiation and Polymers (IRaP) in 2010 and was awarded a feature presentation at the International Meeting on Radiation Processing (IMRP) 2011 in Montreal. Dr. Voit has been invited on an expert mission (May 2011) by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Atomic Energy Research Institute at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. He has given invited lectures at Texas A&M University, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Georgia Tech and Princeton University. Dr. Voit also consults with TriQuint.

 

Selected Publications

Tough shape memory polymer fiber composites. T. Ware, G. Ellson, A. Kwasnik, S. Drewicz, K. Gall, and W. Voit, Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites. In Press. (2011)

Radiation crosslinked shape-memory polymers. W. Voit, T. Ware and K. Gall.  Polymer 51(15): 3551-3559 (2010).

High-Strain Shape-Memory Polymers.  W. Voit, T. Ware, R. Dasari, P. Smith, L. Danz, D. Simon, S. Barlow, S.R. Marder and K. Gall, Advanced Functional Materials 20(1): 162-171 (2010).

Effects of sensitizer length on radiation crosslinked shape-memory polymers. T. Ware, W. Voit, and K. Gall, Radiation Physics and Chemistry 79(4): 446-453 (2010).

An (18/11)n upper bound for sorting by prefix reversals.  B. Chitturi, W. Fahle, Z. Meng, L. Morales, C.O. Shields, I.H. Sudborough, and W. Voit, Theoretical Computer Science 410(36): 3372-3390 (2009).