The following individuals have been involved in stringently curating programming and organizing the TMS Specialty Congress 2025.
Stephen DeWitt
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Stephen DeWitt is a computational scientist in the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at ORNL. Before joining ORNL he was at the University of Michigan, where he received a BSE in Engineering Physics, a Ph.D. in Applied Physics, and then held a research faculty position in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. His research centers on the development and usage of scalable simulation software to understand the multiscale response of materials to complex processing conditions, such as during additive manufacturing. He is interested in combining simulation methods with in-situ experimental characterization, machine learning, uncertainty quantification, optimization, data assimilation, and materials informatics to drive innovation in materials development and manufacturing.
Rémi Dingreville
Sandia National Laboratories
Rémi Dingreville is a distinguished member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories and staff scientist at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) a DOE Office of Science user facility. His current research is at the intersection of computational materials and data sciences to understand and characterize process-structure-properties for materials reliability across scales. He leads a few research programs at Sandia focused on the discovery of resilient materials and manufacturing processes via AI-guided approaches. Dingreville holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Ali Riza Durmaz
Fraunhofer-Institut für Werkstoffmechanik IWM
Ali Riza Durmaz is an early career scientist and deputy group manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM in Freiburg, Germany. He has a background in microsystems engineering and materials science, having earned his Ph.D. from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. Throughout his scientific career, he has shifted his focus from experimental micromechanics to computational materials science and has made notable contributions in the fields of deep learning for microstructure recognition and polycrystal graph representations for materials fatigue predictions. Durmaz's current research interests involve integrating high-throughput experimental characterization techniques with data-driven modelling approaches to establish microstructure-property relationships and gain new mechanistic insights into materials degradation. Throughout his young research career, Durmaz has been awarded several scholarships, including the Bosch Research Foundation Scholarship for his Ph.D. work, which was later recognized with the Südwestmetall Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Industrial Landscape.
Robert Maass
Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing (BAM)
Robert Maass obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Science from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, held postdoc positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and the California Institute of Technology, and was a junior research group leader at the University of Göttingen. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 2015, where he still enjoys an adjunct appointment. Since 2020, he is head of the Materials Engineering Department and a member of the directorate at the Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing (BAM) in Berlin, Germany. To date, he has published about 100 international peer-reviewed articles in mechanical metallurgy and given more than 60 invited lectures. His research interests revolve around thermo-mechanical microstructure-property relations of amorphous and crystalline metals.
Victoria Miller
University of Florida
Assistant Professor Victoria (Tori) Miller has been in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Florida (UF) since September 2019. Prior to her appointment at UF, she was an assistant professor at North Carolina State University from 2017 to 2019. She received her B.S.E. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2011 and completed her Ph.D. in the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2016. After graduate school, she worked for a year at UES, Inc. as a Research Scientist onsite in the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, OH. She had also previously worked at Ford Motor Company Research and Development, Toyota Engineering and Manufacturing North America, and Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. Outside the lab, she trains for and competes in powerlifting.
Henry Proudhon
Mines Paris, PSL University
Henry Proudhon graduated in mechanical engineering from the École Centrale de Lyon, France in 2001. He then obtained his Ph.D. in materials science in 2005 from Université de Lyon, on the study of fatigue cracking mechanisms using synchrotron X-ray tomography. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia, working with Warren Poole on the Bauschinger Effect. In 2007, he joined the Materials Centre at École des Mines de Paris, as a CNRS Research Fellow, to conduct research into the three-dimensional study of deformation and fracture in polycrystalline materials. The idea was then to couple synchrotron X-ray investigations with numerical mechanics and microstructure calculation to study crystalline plasticity, fatigue, and fracture of materials. In 2015, he defended his professorial thesis at Université Paris Sud and was also associated with the SOLEIL synchrotron near Paris. His expertise in on metal plasticity and fatigue fracture, with a focus on 3D imaging of structural materials, but also X-ray diffraction, Finite Element simulation, and artificial intelligence algorithms applied to materials problems.
Henry Proudhon was a visiting researcher at UC Santa Barbara in Tresa Pollock's research group, working with the Tribeam characterization technique, in particular on gamma-TiAl alloys. Back in France, he invested the field of artificial intelligence applied to materials, with the aim of processing more automatically the large masses of data collected by tomography and 4D imaging of materials. Since 2019, he holds the BIGMECA chair with Safran, with the aim of applying the latest advances in 4D imaging and artificial intelligence to the mechanics of materials. Today, this research is finding outlets in many fields, such as new non destructive methods or optimizing material properties to improve service life or recyclability. Ever since he joined the CNRS, he has been teaching, whether it's plasticity, mechanics via an original drone manufacturing challenge, materials imaging or a week-long course on artificial intelligence applied to materials.
His research work was published in more than 85 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and he is co-author of 6 patents. In 2016, he received the 2016 FEMS/TMS Young Leader International Scholar award and in 2024 he received the David Embury award for Educational Innovation. Over the past 2 years, Henry Proudhon has been highly involved in science outreach, particularly among young people and in the southern Seine-et-Marne region where he lives.
Tim Rupert
Johns Hopkins University
Tim Rupert is an associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Irvine, with a joint appointment in mechanical and aerospace engineering. He received a B.S./M.S. in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2007 and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2011.
Rupert's research focuses on uncovering new structure-property relationships in nanomaterials for structural and energy applications, as well as increasing the reliability and lifetime of these materials. To achieve their research goals, his lab uses a combination of computational and experimental techniques.
In recent years, Rupert has received an NSF CAREER Award, a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program Award, an Army Research Office Young Investigator Program Award, a Hellman Fellowship, the ASM International Bradley Stoughton Award for Young Teachers, and the AIME-TMS Rossiter W. Raymond Memorial Award. He serves on the editorial boards of Materials Science and Engineering A, Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A, and Scientific Reports.
Rupert has served TMS in a number of capacities. He is the current chair of the Thin Films and Interfaces Committee, following terms as vice-chair and secretary. He has also been a Programming Committee representative, served on the Awards Subcommittee, and was a Young Leaders representative for the Structural Materials Division Council. Rupert recently helped lead the planning and implementation of the inaugural Frontiers of Materials Award.
Can Yildirim
The European Synchrotron (ESRF)
Can Yildirim is a scientist at the ID03 Hard X-ray Microscopy beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), France. He received his Ph.D. degree in condensed-matter physics from the University of Liège, Belgium, and the University of Pierre and Marie Curie, France, in 2016. He completed postdoctoral research at CEA-Leti and the ESRF ID06-HXM beamline between 2016 and 2020. His research interests include advanced x-ray diffraction imaging techniques and the study of metal alloys. Yildirim's work focuses on exploring structure-property relationships in solid-state materials through the development and application of novel x-ray imaging and diffraction methodologies. He currently holds a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and has published more than 40 ISI publications, with an h-index of 15 and an i10-index of 23 as of 2024.