Kiran N. Solanki is an associate professor of mechanical engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport & Energy (SEMTE) at Arizona State University (ASU). Prior to coming to ASU, he was an associate director for the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems at Mississippi State University (MSU). Dr. Solanki received his Ph.D. from MSU in December 2008. Dr. Solanki’s research interest is at the interface of solid mechanics and material science, with a focus on characterizing and developing microstructure-based structure–property relationships across multiple length and time scales. To date, he has coauthored more than 60 journal articles, four book chapters, and more than 35 conference proceedings with faculty and students at ASU and MSU. In addition, his paper published in Engineering Fracture Mechanics was recognized as one of the most highly cited papers from years 2002 to 2005. For his efforts to promote the education of engineering students in the area of fatigue technology, he was awarded the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Henry O. Fuch Award by the SAE Fatigue Design & Evaluation Committee. In 2011, Dr. Solanki received The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society’s (TMS) Light Metals Magnesium Best Fundamental Research Paper Award for his work on predicting deformation and failure behavior in magnesium alloys using a multiscale modeling approach. He received the 2013 TMS Light Metals Division Young Leader Professional Development Award; the 2013 Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Research Award; the 2013 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Orr Award for Early Career Excellence in Fatigue, Fracture, and Creep; and the 2016 Science Award from ECI/ONR.Co-EditorsDmytro Orlov, Ph.D., is Professor and Head of the Division of Materials Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering (LTH) in Lund University, Lund, Sweden. Among other professional activities, at present he hasa joint appointment as a senior scientist at the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia and serves as a Vice Chair of the Magnesium Committee of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS).Dr. Orlov obtained all graduate degrees at Donetsk National Technical University in Ukraine. During his Ph.D. studies he joined a research institute within National Academy of Sciences–Ukraine where he spent ten years, and then almost ten years on postdoctoral and senior research positions in world-renowned laboratories at Osaka, Kyoto, and Ritumeikan Universities in Japan, Monash University in Australia, and University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia. In the latter university he also received habilitation. To date, his track record includes more than 20 research projects, seven patents, more than 70 research papers and books, and approximately as many lectures at international meetings among which more than 20 were invited.Dr. Orlov’s background is in the engineering of thermo-mechanical processing technologies for metallic materials fabrication with a core expertise in the design of deformation processing based techniques. The primary scope of his laboratory within LTH is the engineering of novel hybrid, composite and mono-materials with hierarchical structures architectured from atomic- through to macro-scales. His present research interests and ongoing research projects are focused on the design of Mg alloys for biomedical and lightweight mobility applications, multi-scale architectured structures with topological control of their heterogeneity, and the development of relevant in-situ characterization techniques at large-scale facilities.Alok Singh is a chief researcher in the Structural Materials Unit of National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan. He studied metallurgical engineering at undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels. His Ph.D. work at the Indian Institute of Science was on the study of quasicrystalline andrelated intermetallic phases in aluminum alloys by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). He tackled the complex structures and reciprocal space of quasicrystals and its indexing problems.After working for several years studying advanced materials by TEM at the Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research, and visited National Research Institute for Metals in Japan, he moved to his present working place National Institute for Materials Science in 2002, and started working on magnesium alloys with special emphasis on Mg-Zn-RE alloys containing stable quasicrystal phase. His work has demonstrated very high strength with ductility in these alloys. These high mechanical properties have been analyzed with respect to microstructural characteristics. He has employed TEM to study dislocations, grain boundaries and twins, and interactions among these, to understand deformation behavior of magnesium alloys. Recently, he is applying advanced TEM techniques of scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) to study severely plastically deformed (SPD, a current trend in materials to achieve nano-scale microstructures) magnesium alloys, which is a challenge for the conventional TEM because of the strong contrast from high amount of mechanical strain. He has more than 90 refereed publications, more than 30 contributions to proceedings, and several patents on magnesium alloys. As a member of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Societ (TMS), he is a regular attendee of TMS annual meetings and has been involved with the Magnesium Committee for many years. He has been JOM representative and Vice Chair of the Magnesium Committee. He received the TMS Magnesium Fundamental Research Award for year 2009 along with his coworkers.Neale R. Neelameggham is ‘The Guru’ at IND LLC, involved in international consulting in the field of metals and associated chemicals (boron, magnesium, titanium, and lithium and rare earth elements), thiometallurgy, energy technologies, soil biochemical reactor design, etc. He was a visiting expert at Beihang University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing, China. He was a plenary speaker at the Light Metal Symposium in South Africa – on low carbon dioxide emission processes for magnesium.Dr. Neelameggham has more than 38 years of expertise in magnesium production and was involved in process development of its startup company NL Magnesium through to the present US Magnesium LLC, UT until 2011. Neelameggham and Brian Davis authored the ICE-JNME award winning (2016) paper—“21st Century Global Anthropogenic Warming Convective Model”—which notes that constrained air mass warming is independent of the energy conversion source - fossil or renewable energy. He is presently developing Agricoal™ and agricoalture to improve arid soils.Dr. Neelameggham holds 16 patents and patent applications, and has published several technical papers. He has served on the Magnesium Committee ofthe Light Metals Division (LMD) of TMS since its inception in 2000, chaired it in 2005, and in 2007 he was made a permanent co-organizer for the Magnesium Symposium. He has been a member of the Reactive Metals Committee, Recycling Committee, and Titanium Committee, and has been the Programming Committee Representative of LMD and LMD Council.Dr. Neelameggham was the inaugural chair, when in 2008, LMD and EPD (Extraction & Processing Division) created the Energy Committee, and has been a co-editor of the energy technology symposium proceedings through the present. He received the LMD Distinguished Service Award in 2010. While he was the chair of the Hydro and Electrometallurgy Committee he initiated the rare metal technology symposium in 2014. He is co-editor of the 2017 proceedings for the symposia on magnesium technology, energy technology, rare metal technology and solar cell silicon.Wim H. Sillekens is a project manager in the Strategic & Emerging Technologies Team at the research and technology center of the European Space Agency (ESA–ESTEC), where he is currently acting as the coordinator of the European Community research project ExoMet. He obtained his Ph.D. from Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, on a subject relating to metal-forming technology. Since he has been engaged in aluminum and magnesium research, amongst others on (hydro-mechanical) forming, recycling/refining, (hydrostatic) extrusion, forging, magnesium-based biodegradable implants, and as of late on light-metal matrix nanocomposites and grain-refined materials. His professional career includes positions as a post-doc researcher at his alma mater and as a research scientist / project leader at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). International working experience includes a placement as a research fellow at MEL (now AIST) in Tsukuba, Japan. He has (co)-authored a variety of publications (about 150 entries to date). Other professional activities include an involvement in association activities (amongst others, as the lead organizer of TMS Magnesium Technology 2011), international conference committees, and as a peer reviewer of research papers and proposals. Research interests are in physical and mechanical metallurgy in general and in light-metals technology in particular.
