The Speakers

Allison Beese

Allison Beese is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State, where she has been on the faculty since 2013. She serves as the senior associate director of Penn State's National Security Institute and co-directs CIMP-3D. Her research addresses experimental and computational multiscale mechanics of metals, connecting microstructure to deformation, damage, and failure — most notably establishing how internal defects govern the failure of additively manufactured metals, and developing methods to design functionally graded AM materials. She holds a B.S. from Penn State and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT, all in mechanical engineering, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern. Her honors include the TMS Brimacombe Medal, the ASTM Young Professional in Additive Manufacturing Award, and Penn State's Faculty Scholar Medal in Engineering

Michael Demkowicz

Michael J. Demkowicz is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, where he is a Presidential Impact Fellow and a 2025 Chancellor EDGES Fellow. His group studies the fundamental mechanisms of damage and deformation in solids, bridging experiment, simulation, and theory, with work spanning hydrogen–metal interactions and hydrogen-assisted crack initiation in Ni-base superalloys, radiation response and helium bubble–induced embrittlement, and the design of nano-layered metallic composites. He previously led the NNSA-funded Center for Research Excellence on Dynamically Deformed Solids (CREDDS). Demkowicz earned B.S. degrees in aerospace engineering and physics and a B.A. from the Plan II Honors Program at UT Austin, and his S.M. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT. Following a postdoctoral appointment at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a faculty position at MIT, he joined Texas A&M in 2016. His honors include the TMS Brimacombe Medal (2022), the TMS Early Career Faculty Fellow Award, and an NSF CAREER Award

Lindsay Greer

A. Lindsay Greer is Professor of Materials Science in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Materials Science at Sidney Sussex College. His research concerns microstructural kinetics — how materials change their structures — with particular emphasis on glass formation and crystal nucleation, the mechanical behavior of metallic glasses, grain refinement in solidification, chalcogenide thin films for phase-change data storage, and electromigration. He earned his MA and PhD at Cambridge under John Leake, then held postdoctoral and Assistant Professor of Applied Physics appointments at Harvard before returning to Cambridge, where he has served as Head of the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy (2006–2013) and Head of the School of the Physical Sciences (2016–2019); since 2024 he has been President of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. He is co-author with K.F. Kelton of Nucleation in Condensed Matter, an editor of Philosophical Magazine, and has published over 450 papers. His honors include the Bruce Chalmers and Light Metals Awards of TMS, the Hume-Rothery Prize and the Griffith and John Hunt Medals of IOM3, the Honda Kotaro Memorial Medal, the Leibniz Medal of IFW Dresden, and honorary doctorates from AGH Kraków and the University of Sofia.

Randi Holmestad

Randi Holmestad is Professor of Physics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, where she has held a professorship since 1999 and leads the TEM Gemini Centre, a joint NTNU–SINTEF research collaboration on atomic-scale materials characterization. Her research centers on materials physics and the link between microstructure and macroscopic properties, using transmission electron microscopy and electron diffraction — including quantitative convergent-beam electron diffraction and scanning precession electron diffraction. She is best known for nanoscale studies of precipitation in age-hardenable aluminium alloys, particularly the Al–Mg–Si (6xxx) system, alongside work on grain boundary segregation and corrosion, solar cell materials, functional oxides, and the joining of aluminium to dissimilar metals. Much of this work has been conducted in long-running partnerships with SINTEF and the Norwegian aluminium industry, and she will lead Norway's new Centre for Research-based Innovation on Future Aluminium. She earned her Siv.ing. in technical physics (1991) and Dr.ing. in materials physics (1994) from the Norwegian Institute of Technology, and has supervised 19 PhD students and some 70 MSc students

Christopher Hutchinson

Christopher Hutchinson is the Alcoa Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He obtained his PhD from the University of Virginia (USA), and after a post-doc at Grenoble Institute of Technology (France), returned to Melbourne to take up a Faculty position at Monash University.

His interests are in the physical and mechanical metallurgy of engineering alloys with a particular emphasis on steels, Al alloys and Cu and brasses. He is interested in all aspects of solid-state microstructure formation and evolution, as well as the quantitative link between these microstructures and properties such as strength, strain hardening, fracture, fatigue, wear, corrosion, etc… His work is split approximately equally between theory/modelling and experiment, and around half of his work is in collaboration with industry. He is the Chair of the Woodside Energy FutureLab at Monash and leads the activities on 3D metal printing in this centre.

Megumi Kawasaki

Megumi Kawasaki is Associate Professor of Materials Science in the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University, where she is the Jack R. Meredith Faculty Scholar and directs the Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Lab. Her research centers on the synthesis of bulk nanostructured metals and alloys through severe plastic deformation, particularly high-pressure torsion (HPT), and on the nanostructuring design of engineering metals, metal-matrix nanocomposites, and bulk metastable alloys. Her group has extended HPT beyond grain refinement into the room-temperature diffusion bonding of dissimilar metals — producing supersaturated metastable Al–Mg solid solutions and Al–Cu nanocomposites with intermetallic phases — and characterizes the resulting materials through bulk and micro-mechanical testing across ambient to elevated temperatures, including work on superplasticity, creep, and high-entropy alloys. She earned her B.Eng. in metallurgy and materials science from Osaka Prefecture University (2002) and her M.S. and Ph.D. in materials science from the University of Southern California (2004, 2007), and was on the faculty at Hanyang University in Seoul from 2012 before joining Oregon State. She is Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Materials Science: Metallurgy, an associate editor of Journal of Materials Science, and chairs the International Conference on Superplasticity of Advanced Materials.

Dong (Lilly) Liu

Dong (Lilly) Liu is Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow in Engineering Science at Trinity College. Her research addresses multiscale microstructural and mechanical characterization of advanced engineering materials under extreme conditions — ion, neutron, and proton irradiation, elevated temperatures above 1000 °C, and cryogenic environments — with applications spanning nuclear fission and fusion, aerospace, power electronics and RF devices, hydrogen storage, space, and concentrated solar power. Her materials of interest include nuclear carbon/graphite composites for reactor cores and particle accelerator targets, TRISO fuels, SiC and oxide ceramic-matrix composites for accident-tolerant fuel cladding, MAX phases, GaN-on-diamond and Ga₂O₃, high-entropy alloys, and thermal barrier coatings. Her group specializes in in-situ high-temperature X-ray and neutron tomography and diffraction under mechanical loading, FIB-SEM tomography and digital image correlation, micromechanical testing, Raman spectroscopy, and thermoreflectance methods. She earned her PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of Bristol, then held an 1851 Royal Commission Brunel Fellowship and an EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford (2015–2018) with a Junior Research Fellowship at Mansfield College, before joining Bristol as a Lecturer in 2018, rising to Associate Professor and leading the Materials and Devices theme in the School of Physics. She returned to Oxford in January 2024, and serves on the ASTM C28.07 Committee on Ceramic Matrix Composites, the CMH-17 Ceramic Matrix Testing Working Group, and the IOM3 Ceramic Science Committee.

Emmanuelle Marquis

Emmanuelle A. Marquis is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she leads a group focused on linking atomic-scale phenomena to the evolution of materials behavior. Her research addresses the mechanisms controlling microstructural evolution in alloy systems, interfacial and grain boundary properties, high-temperature oxidation and corrosion, and irradiation effects — spanning reactor pressure vessel and ferritic-martensitic steels, Ni-base alloys, and light alloys including Mg–rare earth systems. She is a leading practitioner of atom probe tomography, having extended the technique to bulk oxides and worked extensively on its underlying physics, data reconstruction, and analysis, and she pairs it with high-resolution TEM/STEM and close collaborations with computational groups. A native of Paris, she holds a B.S. in mathematics from Université Pierre et Marie Curie and an M.S. in materials science from École des Mines de Paris, and earned her PhD at Northwestern University with David Seidman and David Dunand. She was a member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, then held a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship at the University of Oxford, where she also ran the atom probe laboratory, before joining Michigan in 2011. She directed the Michigan Center for Materials Characterization from 2015 to 2020, and her honors include the Microanalysis Society's K.F.J. Heinrich Award.

Marcos Martinon-Torres

Marcos Martinón-Torres is Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, where he directs the Pitt-Rivers Laboratory for Archaeological Science and co-leads the Cambridge Heritage Science Hub (CHERISH). His core interests lie in material culture and past technologies, the contexts in which innovations arise, and the transmission of technical knowledge, approached through a combination of analytical study of archaeological materials, experimental reconstruction, and historical sources. He is a specialist in archaeometallurgy — including copper and bronze production, crucibles and technical ceramics, lead-silver smelting, and ancient goldwork, notably Muisca metalwork from Colombia — with fieldwork and analytical projects across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. He spent over a decade at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, where he was Professor of Archaeological Science, before joining Cambridge in 2018. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Archaeological Science and serves on numerous international editorial and advisory boards.

Mark Miodownik

Mark Miodownik is Professor of Materials and Society in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UCL, where he co-founded and directs the Institute of Making, home to a materials library open to researchers, artists, and the public. In May 2025 he was appointed Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science — only the second holder of the post, following Brian Cox — with a five-year mission focused on how society makes, uses, reuses, and recycles products, given that materials production accounts for more than 40% of global warming emissions. For over two decades he has championed research linking materials science and engineering to the arts, humanities, and medicine, with current work spanning self-healing and "animate" materials, plastic and electronic waste reduction, and the reframing of repair and reuse against a culture of disposability; he co-chaired the Royal Society's report on animate materials. He is best known to general readers for Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World (2014), a New York Times bestseller that won the Royal Society Science Book Prize. He received his PhD on turbine jet engine alloys from Oxford in 1996 and has worked as a materials engineer in the US, Ireland, and the UK. A frequent broadcaster, he gave the 2010 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and has presented documentaries including The Genius of Invention and How It Works, and he received the Royal Society Faraday Prize for science communication in 2017.

David Srolovitz

David J. Srolovitz is Dean of Engineering, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Chair of Materials Theory at the University of Hong Kong. His research spans materials theory and computational modelling, including crystal defects (surfaces, grain boundaries, dislocations, point defects), microstructure evolution such as grain growth and phase transformations, deformation in nanomaterials, thin film growth, and more recently machine-learned interatomic potentials and heterostructured materials. He is the author of over 500 papers, with an h-index above 90 and more than 30,000 citations. He received his B.A. in physics from Rutgers University in 1978 and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. in materials science from the University of Pennsylvania, then held staff positions at Exxon Corporate Research and Los Alamos National Laboratory before faculty appointments at the University of Michigan, Princeton, Yeshiva University, the University of Pennsylvania (as Joseph Bordogna Professor of Engineering and Applied Science), and City University of Hong Kong — spanning departments of materials science, mechanical and aerospace engineering, computer science, physics, and applied mathematics. He also served as Executive Director of Singapore's Institute of High Performance Computing and Scientific Director of its Science and Engineering Research Council. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of MRS, TMS, ASM, and the Institute of Physics, and has received the MRS Materials Theory Award and the 2026 TMS William Hume-Rothery Award.

Yang Yang

Yang Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State, with appointments in the Materials Research Institute and a courtesy appointment in Nuclear Engineering. His group works at the intersection of materials science, nuclear engineering, and mechanics, combining advanced electron microscopy with computational modeling to understand how materials degrade in extreme environments — irradiation, corrosion, mechanical deformation, and high temperature. He specializes in in-situ and environmental TEM and four-dimensional STEM, including precession-assisted 4D-STEM for nanometer-resolution strain and orientation mapping during gas–solid reactions, with recent work on short-range order and its effect on mechanical behavior, dislocations in van der Waals layered materials, and radiation-induced structural change in metallic glasses. He earned his B.Eng. in nuclear science and technology from the University of Science and Technology of China and his PhD in nuclear science and engineering from MIT in 2019, then conducted postdoctoral research at the National Center for Electron Microscopy at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before joining Penn State in June 2021. He received a DOE Early Career Research Program Award, was named the inaugural TMS/KIM Young Leaders International Scholar in 2025, and TMS early career scholar in 2026

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