Current TMS News

TMS Looks Back at 2019

Happy New Year to our members and friends around the world!

For this edition of TMS News, we're pausing to look back at some of the highlights of the past year and to provide you with a sample of some of our key activities in membership, meetings, publications, outreach, and the TMS Foundation in 2019.

Once you’ve taken this time to reflect on what we've accomplished together, we hope you’ll be excited to embark on a new year of adventures with TMS. Here’s to a successful and productive 2020!

2019 Membership Highlights

A total of 14,150 individuals called themselves TMS members in 2019, up from 13,887 in 2018. Our membership is made up of minerals, metals, and materials scientists, engineers, and students throughout the world. 

All TMS members benefitted from a new service in 2019: the availability of the magazine portion of the monthly TMS member journal, JOM, in downloadable PDF format. With the rise in on-line only subscribers to JOM, this convenient way to read the journal—and monthly notification e-mails to remind members when new issues are available—makes it easy to stay up-to-date with TMS. Download the newest issue of JOM. 

Also new for 2019 was the introduction of the TMS Light Metals Digital Library, a resource available exclusively to TMS members. For an additional $50 subscription fee per year, TMS members can access more than 5,200 technical papers published from 1971 to 2010 as part of TMS’s signature Light Metals proceedings series. Learn more about the Light Metals Digital Library.

2019 Meetings & Events Highlights

Each year, two multi-disciplinary annual conferences bring together the diverse interests of the TMS community, offering members from around the world the chance to meet and discuss their work in person.

In March, the TMS 2019 Annual Meeting & Exhibition (TMS2019) convened in San Antonio, Texas, drawing a total of 4,494 minerals, metals, and materials scientists, engineers, and students from around the world. The sixth installment of the REWAS 2019 symposium was held as a co-located meeting with TMS2019, and TMS offered three professional development courses on the topics of additive manufacturing and powder handling in conjunction with the conference.

In the fall, Materials Science & Technology 2019 (MS&T19) attracted more than 2,800 professionals and students to Portland, Oregon, September 29–October 3. The 2019 meeting featured a co-located workshop on additive manufacturing sponsored by TMS, and the conference’s technical program encompassed more than 85 symposia in 13 topic areas. For 2020, MS&T’s technical program will expand to include approximately 100 symposia, a 10% increase over previous years. The call for abstracts is now open for MS&T20, to be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 4–8. Submit your work by March 15 to be a part of this event.

In addition, each year TMS holds smaller, more focused specialty conferences to bring together experts working in a particular technology area. For 2019, those specialty conferences were:

• 5th World Congress on Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME 2019), held July 21–25, 2019, in Indianapolis, Indiana
• 11th International Conference on Porous Metals and Metallic Foams (MetFoam 2019), held August 20–23, 2019, in Dearborn, Michigan
• 2019 Liquid Metal Processing & Casting Conference, held September 8–11, 2019, in Birmingham, UK
• World Congress on High Entropy Alloys (HEA 2019), held November 17–20, 2019, in Seattle, Washington

TMS also held the following stand-alone, multi-day professional development courses for scientists and engineers to enhance their skills:

• TMS Aluminum Cast Shop Science & Technology Course, held May 6–10, 2019, in Athens, Greece
• 2019 TMS Control of Potline Scrubbers & Fugitive Emissions for Aluminum Smelters Course, held June 17–20, 2019, in Hamburg, Germany
• TMS Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Professional Engineer (PE) Licensing Exam Review Course, held August 14–17, 2019, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• 2019 TMS Anode Technology for the Aluminum Industry Course, held September 9–13, 2019, in Årdal, Norway

For a look at what's planned for 2020, view our upcoming meetings and upcoming professional development events calendars.

2019 Publications Highlights

TMS released the following three studies in 2019, all of which are now available for free download through the TMS website:

• Metamorphic Manufacturing: Shaping the Future of On-Demand Components
• Verification and Validation of Computational Models Associated with the Mechanics of Materials
• Creating the Next-Generation Materials Genome Initiative Workforce

The newest TMS study team is currently working on Accelerating the Broad Implementation of Verification and Validation in Computational Models of the Mechanics of Materials and/or Structures, supported by the NSF, and set to be released in August 2020.

Learn more about TMS Studies.

In journals news, the Impact Factors for TMS’s four long-established journals continued their upward trend with the release of the 2018 Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics, 2019). Impact Factor is the average number of citations counted in a given Impact Factor year for articles published in the two preceding years. It is based on the number of citations of a journal’s content divided by the number of citable articles published by that journal.

What follows are the 2019 numbers for each journal (with 2018 numbers in parentheses, for reference):

• JOM: 2.305 (2.145)
• Journal of Electronic Materials: 1.676 (1.566)
• Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A: 1.985 (1.887)
• Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B: 1.952 (1.834)

Learn more about TMS journals.

2019 Outreach Highlights

At TMS, outreach takes a number of formats, from educating government leaders about the benefits of new technologies to encouraging students to enter the materials fields. Here are a few highlights from 2019.

In June, TMS and the United Engineering Foundation sponsored a Congressional Briefing, hosted by the House Manufacturing Caucus, in Washington D.C. for more than 80 Congressional staff members and others engaged with public policy development. The topic was metamorphic manufacturing, a new technology that was explored in-depth in the TMS technical report, Metamorphic Manufacturing: Shaping the Future of On-Demand Components. Glenn Daehn, the study team lead and Fontana Professor of Metallurgical Engineering at The Ohio State University, was the featured speaker at the briefing. You can download a copy of the study through the TMS website, and access a recording of the June 6 Congressional Briefing, including the question and answer session, through the House Manufacturing Caucus website.

While in the U.S. capital, TMS leaders also participated in the STEM Inclusion Study Best Practices Workshop, which was based on the results of the 2018 STEM Inclusion Study, funded by the National Science Foundation. Several members of TMS leadership and representatives from other science and engineering organizations, spent a day discussing and brainstorming how all societies can better promote equality and inclusion among the STEM communities represented by our memberships. TMS was the only materials professional society that participated in this groundbreaking assessment of diverse groups in the STEM workplace, and many of the ideas they discussed are now being explored and developed more fully through the TMS Diversity Committee. Learn more about Diversity and Inclusion initiatives at TMS.

Also in 2019, TMS added a new topic area to its Materials Explorers™ STEM educational outreach program, which equips TMS members with learning modules and educational activities that they can take into classrooms in their community to interest high school students in science. “The Materials that Move Us,” developed with support from Arconic Foundation, is a new collection of Materials Explorers™ activities that teach materials science and engineering concepts through the framework of real-world applications such as aircraft, ships, and automobiles. Learn more about Materials Explorers™.

Students attending the TMS 2019 Annual Meeting & Exhibition were also encouraged to explore materials in more depth by participating in the 2019 Bladesmithing Competition, which ultimately attracted 33 entries from student teams around the world. The University of Florida's entry, "Decapigator," took home the $2,000 TMS-Wadsworth-Sherby Grand Prize. Learn more about Bladesmithing at TMS.

2019 TMS Foundation Highlights

TMS is still tallying the results of the 2019 year-end campaign for the TMS Foundation, which ended December 31, but we would like to thank all of you who have donated in the past year and contributed to the mission of the TMS Foundation.

In 2019, the Foundation continued to fund its traditional scholarships and leadership development programs for students and young professionals. Thanks to generous contributions, here’s what the Foundation accomplished last year:

• 32 travel grants to attend TMS2019 and MS&T19
• 10 Young Leaders Professional Development Awards to help early-career professionals attend TMS2019 and participate in high-level meetings of the Society’s membership
• 12 academic scholarships to assist students financially in achieving their academic goals
• 3 Battelle Materials Graduate Student Awards to students who continued on to graduate school
• 6 Emerging Leaders Alliance (ELA) scholarships to allow young professionals to attend the 2019 ELA conference
• 2 young academic professionals were selected as Early Career Faculty Fellows
• 2 Best Paper Awards for students
• 2 International Scholar Awards, which allowed young professionals to attend and present research at annual meetings of the Japan Institute of Metals and Materials (JIM) and the Federation of European Materials Societies (FEMS)

Also in 2019, the TMS Foundation Board of Trustees adopted a new signature program statement that reflects the Foundation’s core mission of supporting and advancing the next generation of professionals: The TMS Foundation supports students and young professionals with meaningful financial assistance and impactful career-building experiences.

As a part of the kick-off to the new signature program, the Foundation also debuted a fresh, new look and totally redesigned website. Explore the new site today to learn more about Foundation-funded awards and programs, read stories of impact from current and past award recipients, and review contribution options to see how you can make a difference in 2020.

More details on the 2019 year-end results will be added to the new website soon, including the 2019 Annual Giving Honor Roll. You will also be able to view the 2019 Honor Roll at the TMS Member Welcome Center in San Diego, California, during TMS2020 on February 23–27, 2020.