In This Issue
TMS Looks Back at 2018
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 previous year before rolling full speed ahead into 2019 and beyond. Read on for a sampling of our key activities in membership, meetings, publications, outreach, and the TMS Foundation from the past year.
While we look back at 2018, we are also looking to the future. Just last month, this newsletter announced the new TMS strategic plan, TMS Aspires, which the TMS Board of Directors adopted in October. This new plan consists of three goals intended to inspire the membership and leadership of the organization over the next several years. View the
Strategic Goals website for more details on our areas of focus for the future.
So take a moment to reflect on what we've accomplished together and then get ready for another active year with TMS. Here's to a successful 2019 for us all!
2018 Membership Highlights
Free subscriptions to the TMS member journal,
JOM; technical meetings; and networking opportunities were the aspects of TMS that members reported valuing most in the
2018 TMS Member Survey, conducted in August. Also highly rated was the
TMS Member Library, which provides TMS members with access to nearly 3,000 technical articles from TMS publications. Nearly 800 papers from past installments of the World Titanium Conference were added to this resource in 2018, further increasing its value to members. Distributed to TMS members every few years, the TMS Member Survey provides regular feedback on how the Society is performing, what members value most, and where improvements might be made.
Prompted by new laws in the European Union, TMS also took steps in 2018 to make its data collection and use practices more transparent to all of our members and stakeholders. As a result, all members now have more clearly available information on how TMS uses the data we collect, an easier way to manage communication preferences, and the assurance that safety measures are in place to protect your data. For more details, read "
How Does TMS Protect Your Information?" in the September issue of
JOM.
2018 Meetings & Events Highlights
Drawing nearly 4,300 attendees to Phoenix, Arizona, the TMS 2018 Annual Meeting & Exhibition (TMS2018), held in March, was one of the largest annual meetings in TMS history. Charlie Kuehmann of Tesla and SpaceX delivered the all-conference plenary talk, a new feature introduced for 2018 and to be repeated at TMS2019 with scheduled speaker Luana Iorio of GE Aviation. The conference also hosted the co-located 2nd International Conference on Computational Design and Simulation of Materials (CDSM 2018), which was organized jointly by TMS and the Chinese Society for Metals (CSM), as well as a special keynote session organized by the Federation of European Materials Societies (FEMS).
Also well-attended was the Materials Science & Technology 2018 (MS&T18) conference, held in Columbus, Ohio, in October, with more than 3,100 scientists and engineers participating from the five materials-related organizing societies: TMS, the American Ceramic Society, the Association for Iron & Steel Technology, ASM International, and the Metallurgy & Materials Society (MetSoc) of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy & Petroleum (CIM).
TMS was also an organizer of three new events in 2018. First, Additive Manufacturing Benchmarks 2018 (AM-Bench 2018) was held June 18–21, 2018 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. TMS then teamed up with MetSoc and the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration (SME) to hold Extraction 2018, the first in a series of collaborative global metallurgy conferences, August 26–29 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Then in September, TMS offered a new, two-day course, Machine Learning for Materials Science, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In addition, TMS held a number of its ongoing specialty conferences and other events in which the Society had ownership, sponsorship, and/or management interest:
OTC Asia 2018, March 20–23, 2018, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Offshore Technology Conference (OTC2018), April 30–May 3, 2018, Houston, Texas, USA
1st International Conference on Technological Innovations in Metals Engineering (TIME), May 30–31, 2018, Haifa, Israel
2018 Superalloy 718 & Derivatives: Energy, Aerospace, and Industrial Applications, June 3–6, 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
4th International Congress on 3D Materials Science (3DMS 2018), June 10–13, 2018, Helsingør (Elsinore), Denmark
Diversity in the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Professions 3 (DMMM3), July 23–24, 2018, Santa Barbara, California, USA
Arctic Technology Conference, November 5–7, 2018, Houston, Texas, USA
The Society also offered opportunities for scientists and engineers to enhance their skills with these stand-alone courses and webinars:
2018 Control of Potline Scrubber & Fugitive Emissions for Aluminum Smelters Course, May 21–24, 2018, Québec City, Québec, Canada
2018 TMS Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Professional Engineer (PE) Licensing Exam Review Course, August 1–4, 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Corrosion Fundamentals Three-Part Webinar Series, live events held in August and September 2018. Webinar recordings are now available for purchase.
A dozen professional development courses and workshops were also held in conjunction with TMS2018, as well as four offered at MS&T18. For a look at what's planned for 2019, view our upcoming meetings and upcoming professional development events calendars.
2018 Publications Highlights
TMS continued its leadership in developing influential technology and roadmapping studies with the release of two new reports in 2018:
Advanced Computation and Data in Materials and Manufacturing: Core Knowledge Gaps and Opportunities (October 2018), organized by TMS on behalf of the U.S. National Science Foundation, and
Harnessing Materials Innovations to Support Next Generation Manufacturing Technologies (March 2018), organized by TMS on behalf of the Alliance for Manufacturing Foresight (MForesight). Copies of each of these reports are available for free download through the
TMS Studies website. The
Advanced Computation and Data report has already been downloaded more than 1,600 times, and the
Harnessing Materials Innovation study more than 1,400 times.
TMS journals largely continued their positive upward Impact Factor (IF) trend with the release of the 2017 Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics, 2018). IF is the average number of citations counted in the 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 2017 numbers for TMS's four long-established journals (with 2016 numbers in parentheses):
- JOM: 2.145 (1.860)
- Journal of Electronic Materials: 1.566 (1.579)
- Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A: 1.887 (1.874)
- Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B: 1.834 (1.642)
TMS has also been developing a new online resource collection—the Light Metals Digital Library—set to be unveiled in early 2019. Look for a formal announcement of this new resource in a future issue of TMS News.
2018 Outreach Highlights
TMS unveiled
Materials Explorers ™, its new STEM educational outreach initiative, in connection with the TMS 2018 Annual Meeting & Exhibition in Phoenix, Arizona, in March. The public launch was held at the Arizona Science Center, where young students were encouraged to explore materials science and engineering through fun, hands-on activities, and educators learned how to integrate the curriculum into their classrooms. Following the launch, TMS initiated a campaign to encourage its members to take the resources developed for
Materials Explorers™ to their local schools. Interested TMS members can learn more about volunteering to bring this program to their local school through the
Materials Explorers™ website.
TMS collected a record number of entries for its 2019
Bladesmithing Competition, which will be held at the TMS 2019 Annual Meeting & Exhibition in March. The TMS Bladesmithing Competition, held once every two years, challenges student teams from around the world to produce a blade by hand hammering or trip hammer forging. More than 40 teams have registered to participate in the 2019 event.
In April, TMS leaders traveled to Washington, D.C. to discuss current legislative issues with members of Congress. Kevin J. Hemker, 2018 TMS President, and James J. Robinson, TMS Executive Director, visited the offices of seven Congressional leaders to
discuss legislative priorities that can impact TMS members. Specifically, they focused on the Fair Access to Science & Technology Research Act of 2017, the Scientific Integrity Act, and the BASIC Research Act. For more information on these bills—and the positions that TMS discussed with Congressional leaders—visit the
TMS Public and Government Affairs web pages.
2018 TMS Foundation Highlights
TMS is still tallying the results of the 2018 year-end appeal campaign for the TMS Foundation (which ended December 31), but we thank all of you who have donated in the past year and contributed to the mission of the TMS Foundation.
In 2018, the Foundation continued to fund its traditional scholarships and leadership development programs for young professionals. Thanks to generous contributions, here’s what the Foundation accomplished last year:
- 33 travel grants for students to attend TMS2018 and MS&T18
- 10 academic scholarships to assist students financially in achieving their academic goals
- 2 Battelle Materials Graduate Student Awards to students who continued on to graduate school
- 10 Young Leaders Professional Development Awards to help early-career professionals attend TMS2018 and participate in high-level meetings of the Society’s leadership
- 8 Emerging Leaders Alliance (ELA) scholarships to allow young professionals to attend the 2018 ELA conference
- 3 Best Paper Awards for students
- 2 young academic professionals were selected as Early Career Faculty Fellows
- 1 International Scholar award, which allowed a young professional to attend and present research at the Japan Institute of Metals and Materials (JIM) Annual Spring Meeting
2018 also marked 25 years for the TMS Foundation, with the theme of the year-long celebration focusing on the crucial role that mentors play in the development of young scientists and engineers, connecting them to new colleagues. Anniversary activities kicked off at the TMS 2018 Annual Meeting & Exhibition (TMS2018) by honoring and highlighting how mentors helped shape the careers of TMS members and, by extension, the entire materials science and engineering community. TMS2018 attendees were asked to write the name of their mentor on a leaf that was added to the TMS “family tree.” More than 80 individuals added 140 mentor leaves to the tree throughout the week.
JOM also compiled a list of landmarks since the TMS Foundation’s creation in 1993, illustrated in the May 2018 article “The History of the TMS Foundation: 25 Milestones to Celebrate 25 Years.” To fully understand the TMS Foundation today,
read the article to learn about the Foundation’s beginnings, its purpose and mission, and its portfolio of programs.
More details on 2018 year-end results will be added to the Foundation website soon, including the 2018 Annual Giving Honor Roll. You will also be able to view the 2018 Honor Roll at the TMS Member Welcome Center in San Antonio, Texas, during TMS2019 on March 11–14, 2019.
Learn more about Foundation-funded awards and programs and contribution options.