Robertson honored by ASM

Ian M. Robertson, a Willett Professor of Engineering, has been selected for the prestigious ASM 2014 Campbell Lecturer Award.

An Illinois faculty member since 1983, Robertson is a former head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Illinois. His research group investigates how microstructure evolves in materials exposed to extreme conditions—stress, strain rate, gaseous and chemical environments and radiation--and use this information to understand macroscale property changes. Particular programs include the mechanisms of strain transfer across interfaces, dynamics of deformation and fracture in aggressive and non-aggressive environments, superplasticity, deformation mechanisms under extreme conditions and deformation in nanograined materials.

Robertson is currently the editor-in-chief of the journal, Current Opinion in Solid State and Materials Science. He received his BSc degree in applied physics from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, and his DPhil in metallurgy from Oxford University, England. In 1984 he shared, with Professor H. K. Birnbaum, the Department of Energy Outstanding Science Award in Metals and Ceramics. In 2009 he was named a Fellow of ASM, the Materials Information Society.

The annual ASM lecture was inaugurated in 1926 in memory and recognition of the outstanding scientific contributions to the metallurgical profession by Edward DeMille Campbell, a distinguished educator who was blind for all but two years of his professional life. For 20 years before his death in 1925 he was head professor of Chemistry and Metallurgy and director of the Chemical Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Despite this handicap, he contributed 77 papers to the scientific literature, the majority of which dealt with a correlation of the chemical constituents with the physical and mechanical properties of steels.
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Contact: Ian Robertson, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, 217/333-1440.

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