Ims

Distinguished Faculty Scholar Program

This program supports the visit of a faculty member to spend 8 to 12 weeks at Los Alamos National Laboratory together with some of their students. The goal of this program is to enhance Laboratory collaborations that will generate new initiatives within Materials Science at the Lab, will create additional pipelines for the Laboratory workforce, and will enhance the Lab's reputation in the international Materials Science communities.

Call for IMS Distinguished Faculty Scholar is currently Closed

Full details are available in the official announcement PDF

2024 Awardees

Qi Anheadshotsmall

Dr. Qi An is an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Iowa State University. He received his MS and Ph.D. degrees in Materials Science from Caltech, and his BS degree from the University of Science and Technology of China. His research area is computational materials science.

Dr. An's research focuses on quantum mechanical data-based computational materials science. He is particularly interested in machine learning, machine learning force field, molecular dynamics simulations, quantum mechanics simulations, reactive force field, and applying these methods in advanced materials design.

Giacomo Po

Dr. Giacomo Po joined the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering of the University of Miami as an Assistant Professor in 2019. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became an expert in discrete dislocation dynamics modeling of plastic deformation in crystalline materials. His current research focuses on micromechanical modeling and in-situ experiments of plasticity and fracture in high-temperature metals and ceramics. He has co-authored about seventy international journal publications, and his research is funded by multiple federal agencies including NSF, DOE. Giacomo is the recipient of several awards, including the International Journal of Plasticity Young Investigator Award, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Institute for Materials Science Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award, and the NSF CAREER Award.

2022 Awardees

Yirong Lin Headshot

Dr. Yirong Lin is a Professor in Department of Mechanical Engineering the University of Texas at El Paso.  He was a postdoc at University of Florida and Arizona State University from 2009 to 2011.  He received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Arizona State University in 2009.  His research interest falls in additive manufacturing of advanced ceramic, polymer, and multifunctional material systems for sensing, self-healing, light weight, harsh environment application, energy harvesting and storage. 

Since 2011, 62 students graduated from his research group (8 Ph.D., 17 M.S., and 37 B.S.).  Among all graduates, 12 of them joined workforce at DOE NNSA enterprises, 18 of them joined graduate school after graduating with B.S. degree, and the rest of them are currently working in industry or government agencies including Lockheed Martin, MDA, Nav-Air, LANL, KCNSC, SNL, Intel, Microsoft, and Ford.  His research has been funded by DOE, DOEd, DOD, NRC, and NSF for over $19 M, with $11M as PI .  Since 2007, he has published 127 technical articles (80 peer-reviewed journals and 47 conference proceedings).  He was awarded summer faculty fellowships with SNL, KCNSC, and LANL in the past years.  Extensive research and workforce pipeline have been developed with those NNSA enterprises.  He was awarded the Best Paper Award at SAMPE 2008 Fall technical conference, Honorable Mentioned Best Student Paper at SMASIS 2009 Fall conference, ASME Best Paper in Materials of 2010 at SPIE Smart Materials/NDE 2011 conference, and Dean’s Research Excellence Award in 2018. 

On service front, he was the ABET committee leader from 2014-2018.  He has served as the graduate program director and Associate Department Chair since 2018 and 2020, respectively.  He has served on department’s faculty hiring committee as chair and committee member 8 times.  He was the technical chair of Southwest Emerging Technology Symposium Technical Chair from 2014-2019.  He served as UTEP’s faculty senate from 2017-2019. 

Shokouhi Parisa 002 Headshot

Associate Professor, Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park. 

Professor Shokouhi joined the Engineering Science and Mechanics Department of Penn State in July 2018 as an Associate Professor and a founding member of Penn State Ultrasonic Laboratory. She is also a faculty in Acoustics and Additive Manufacturing and Design graduate programs. Prior to joining the faculty of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Dr. Shokouhi spent about 3 years as an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at Penn State. Before coming to Penn State, Dr. Shokouhi was leading a research group in Nondestructive Testing (NDT) Department of BAM - Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, Berlin, Germany – focused on NDT data fusion. Professor Shokouhi earned her Ph.D. in 2006 from Rutgers University and a B.S. from Sharif University of Technology, the most prestigious engineering school in Iran. She is a recipient of numerous awards and recognitions including, Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT) Fellowship and ASNT Faculty Awards. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Research in Nondestructive Evaluation, the flagship research journal of ASNT.

Dr. Shokouhi’s research interests include: stress wave propagation in fractured and heterogenous media, nondestructive materials characterization and defect detection (nonlinear and linear ultrasonic testing), structural health monitoring (acoustic emission), machine learning and data analytics applied to acoustic data, acoustic/Seismic metamaterials. One of her research thrusts is developing methods for qualification and process control of additively manufactured materials. Her team is working on building a quantitative linkage between AM materials microstructure and ultrasonic response through physics-informed machine learning from a hybrid dataset of simulated and experimental data. Her research has been funded by various programs of Department of Energy (DOE), National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), US Department of Transportation (USDOT) and Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), among others.

When not working, Dr. Shokouhi enjoys learning new languages, traveling to faraway places, reading, road/gravel biking, and running.

2021 Awardees

Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering/Materials Science Program, Computational Materials Science and Design (CMSD) Group, Colorado School of Mines.Professor Tucker joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at Mines in the summer of 2017 as an Assistant Professor and is active in the interdisciplinary Materials Science program at Mines. Before joining the faculty at Mines, he spent 4 years as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University (Philadelphia, PA), and 2 years as a Postdoctoral Research Appointee at Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, NM) in the Computational Materials and Data Science group. While at Drexel, he was awarded the Outstanding Teacher Award in 2015 and the TMS Young Leader Professional Development Award in 2016. Professor Tucker earned his Ph.D. in 2011 from the Georgia Institute of Technology (School of Materials Science and Engineering), and a B.S. in 2004 from Westminster College (Salt Lake City, UT) majoring in both Physics and Mathematics. During his time at Westminster and Georgia Tech, he received several distinctions including the Outstanding Physics Senior Award, Academic All-American (Soccer), and a Sigma Xi nomination. 

His research ambitions are aimed at integrating high-performance computing and theory to discover the fundamental structure-property relationships of materials that will enable the predictive design of advanced materials with tunable properties. Of particular interest are materials where defects and interfacial-driven properties can be effectively tuned or controlled to enable property enhancement, such as nanocrystalline alloys, multicomponent laminates, materials for energy storage, 2D materials, and hierarchical metals. At the core of his group’s approach is to develop collaborations and programs that effectively mesh computation with experiments to tailor functional materials, and pursue novel informatics techniques to build predictive materials models and inverse design strategies.

Research Website 

 David Allen Cockrell Endowed Professor, Materials Science Program and Texas Materials Institute, The University of Texas at Austin.

David Mitlin is a David Allen Cockrell Endowed Professor at the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, he was a Professor and General Electric Chair at Clarkson University, and an Assistant, Associate and full Professor at the University of Alberta, Alberta Canada. Dr. Mitlin has published 155 peer-reviewed journal articles on various aspects of energy storage materials and on corrosion – fouling phenomena. This body of work receives over 2000 citations per year. Dr. Mitlin holds 10 granted U.S. patents and 13 more pending full applications, with all of them licensed currently or in the past. He has presented over 125 invited, keynote and plenary talks at various international conferences. Dr. Mitlin is an Associate Editor for Sustainable Energy and Fuels, a Royal Society of Chemistry Journal focused on renewables. Dave received a Doctorate in Materials Science from U.C. Berkeley in 2000, M.S. from Penn State in 1996, and B.S. from RPI in 1995. He grew up in upstate NY and in southern CT.

Research Website