Elizabeth J. Opila is the Rolls-Royce Commonwealth Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA.  She received her BS in Ceramic Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1981, her MS in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 and her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991. She has been a professor in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Virginia since 2010.  Prior to that she was a research engineer at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.  She is author or coauthor of over 150 publications and the co-inventor on six patents.  Opila is a fellow of the Electrochemical Society.  She is a member of the Basics Science Division and is a fellow of the American Ceramic Society.  Her current research interests focus on the thermochemical stability of materials for extreme environment applications including oxide stability in high temperature water vapor; oxidation of ceramic matrix composites, ultra high temperature ceramics, and refractory alloys as well as environmental barrier coating development.