AlumniPrevious Alumni Awardees
Past Award Winners
MAY 2020 (Awarded May 2022)
Distinguished Career Achievement Award
Professor Masahiro (Mike) Meshii (PhD Kaufmann, 1959). In his long tenure as a faculty member, Professor Meshii helped to establish the materials science and engineering department at Northwestern as a pioneer in the field. He is recognized for his significant contributions to the field using electron microscopy in the areas of amorphization, galvanization, solid-solution softening and fatigue.
Early Career Achievement Award
Dr. Bryce Meredig (PhD 2013, Wolverton) is the Chief Science Officer and Co-Founder of Citrine Informatics. He is recognized for his role in founding the highly successful materials informatics company, Citrine Informatics, and for pioneering work in developing methods to utilize artificial intelligence in materials design and discovery.
May 2019
Distinguished Career Achievement Award
Sung-Shul Shin (PhD '84, Hilliard). President Shin is an internationally renowned scientist in the field of nanomagnetism, having made pioneering contributions to understanding the magnetization reversal dynamics. An innovative leader in higher education, he has served as the 16th – and first alumnus – president of KAIST since 2017.
Early Career Achievement Award
Michael S. Arnold (PhD '06, Hersam and Stupp). Arnold is a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs the Advanced Materials for Energy and Electronics Group. His research seeks to overcome the fundamental challenges to exploit the transformative potential of carbon nanomaterials in (opto)electronics technology.
May 2018
Distinguished Career Achievement Award
Dr. Charles Kuehmann (PhD '94, Olson). Dr. Kuehmann has been a leader in computational materials design since its inception. He currently leads the materials engineering organizations at both Tesla and SpaceX, driving material solutions to enable the world’s transition to a sustainable future, the commercialization of space and a multi-planetary civilization.
Early Career Achievement Award
Dr. Nathan Guisinger (PhD '05, Hersam). Dr. Guisinger has developed a leading effort towards materials discovery, synthesis, characterization and processing, including the discovery of new low-dimensional materials. He is a staff scientist at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory.
May 2017
Distinguished Career Achievement Award
Dr. Yoshio Aoki (PhD '76, Brittain). Dr. Yoshio Aoki is the Vice President for External Collaboration of the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) one of the largest scientific research centers in Japan.
Early Career Achievement Award
Dr. Chantal Sudbrack (PhD '04, Seidman). Dr. Chantal Sudbrack is a superalloy metallurgist with the Materials & Structures Division, High Temperature and Smart Alloys Branch of NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
May 2016
Distinguished Career Achievement Award
Shih-Wei Sun (PhD '86, Wessels), former Chief Executive Officer of United Microelectronics Corporation, Taiwan.
Early Career Achievement Award
Andrea M. Hodge (PhD '02, Dunand), Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Southern California.
May 2015
Distinguished Career Achievement Award
Anil V. Virkar (PhD '73), Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Utah, for his significant contributions in developing ceramic materials for use in energy conversion and storage applications.
Early Career Achievement Award
Jinliu “Grace” Wang (PhD '01), Deputy Assistant Director of the Directorate for Engineering at the National Science Foundation, for her significant contributions to advanced magnetic disk drives while working at IBM and Hitachi and in playing a leadership role at the NSF to successfully promote academic and industry partnerships so that concepts from universities can get to market reality more quickly.
May 2014
Distinguished Career Achievement Award
Didier de Fontaine (PhD '67, Hilliard), Professor Emeritus, Materials Science and Engineering, University of California at Berkeley, for his significant contributions to the field in the areas of phase transformations in alloys, crystallography and thermodynamics of ordering behavior and particularly for his pioneering contributions to calculations of phase equilibria by combined quantum and statistical mechanical methods.
Early Career Achievement Award
Alfred J. Crosby (PhD '00, Shull), Professor, Polymer Science and Engineering Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, for his significant contributions to the field and particularly for breakthroughs in scientific understanding of the mechanical behavior of structured, soft materials leading to development of an important new class of adhesive materials.
May 2013
Distinguished Career Achievement Award
Pulickel M. Ajayan, (PhD '89), Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Rice University.
Early Career Achievement Award
Elizabeth Dickey, (PhD '97), Director of Graduate Programs and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, North Carolina State University.
May 2012
Distinguished Career Achievement Award
Stephen Sass, (PhD '66, Cohen), Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University.
Early Career Achievement Award
Christopher Schuh, (PhD '01, Dunand), Professor and Department Chair of Materials Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of Xtalic Corporation.
Alan Lund, (PhD '02, Voorhees), CTO of Xtalic Corporation.