Dr Maciej Zubko has been employed as an assistant professor at the Institute of Materials Engineering (formerly the Institute of Materials Science) at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Silesia in Katowice since 2012. He obtained his MSc degree (2007) and PhD degree (2012) from the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, the University of Silesia in Katowice, specialisation in Physics. Dr Zubko serves as deputy manager at the Accredited Laboratory for Electron Microscopy (L-TME), which operates as part of the accredited Group of Research Laboratories (ZLB) at the Institute of Materials Engineering.
The primary research techniques used by dr Zubko are transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). Dr Zubko is the leader of a research team dedicated to producing new high-entropy metallic alloys and determining the influence of selected alloying elements on the microstructure, mechanical properties and corrosion resistance of the obtained materials. He also studies engineering materials such as shape memory alloys, nanomaterials, nickel superalloys, nanocrystalline-amorphous composites and catalytic nanomaterials. Dr Zubko’s scientific activity also extends beyond the discipline of materials engineering to include the study of new minerals and plant-nanoparticle interactions.
Dr Zubko is also involved in the application of the electron beam precession method to study the crystal structure of nanoscale objects (< 0.1 μm). Apart from the Institute of Materials Engineering at the University of Silesia, only a few research centres in the world possess this research technique, which is essential for studying a new generation of engineering materials such as nanomaterials. Since 2021, Dr Zubko has been a member of the Commission on Electron Crystallography within the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr), which brings together crystallographers worldwide. Electron crystallography is a scientific discipline concerned with the study of the structure of materials using an electron beam. It is currently one of the most rapidly developing branches of crystallography.
Dr Maciej Zubko is the author and co-author of 140 scientific papers. He has held two six-month research fellowships: at the Jan Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany (2012) and the University of Hradec Kralove in the Czech Republic in late 2018 and early 2019. Dr Zubko was also a lecturer at the ‘Electron Crystallography School – ECS2015’, Poreč, Croatia. Dr Zubko is also interested in the development and application of new methods for structural research. Together with dr Robert Albrecht from the Institute of Materials Engineering at the University of Silesia, he has developed an innovative method for high-resolution imaging of monocrystalline disorientation, claimed by a patent granted in 2020.