David Pine, Professor of Physics, Mathematics and Director of the Center for Soft Matter Research, New York University

Title: Colloids with Directional Interaction

Biography: Pine earned his BS in physics and mathematics from Wheaton College in 1975, and his MS and PhD in physics from Cornell University in 1979 and 1982, respectively. Prior to NYU, he was a professor of chemical engineering and materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara for ten years. He chaired the chemical engineering department from 2001-2004. Pine was also a staff physicist at Exxon Research & Engineering. He has held several appointments in the American Physical Society’s division of condensed matter physics. Pine is also an adjunct professor of chemical engineering at KAIST. He was Co-Editor, The European Physical Journal E (Soft Matter). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.

Hiroaki Imai, Professor, Keio University, Japan

Title: Bioinspired Techniques and Mesoscale and Microscale Hierarchical Assembly

Biography: Imai earned his BS and PhD in applied chemistry at Keio University in 1983 and 1990 respectively. After working at Nippon Sanso Cooperation, he joined the Department of Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University as a Research Associate in 1993 and was promoted to a Professor in 1999. He was a Visiting Scientist at Princeton University, USA from 1996-97. His research interests are bioinspired and biomimetic processing for hierarchically structured functional materials using self-organization and self-assembly.

Christophe Martin, Grenoble INP, France

Title: Simulations of Particle Packing Effects on Sintering Defects and Deformation

Biography: Martin earned his MS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1992, his PhD in Materials Science from Grenoble INP in 1995, and his HDR in Materials Science from Grenoble INP in 2005. He was a Visiting Scientist at Kyoto University, Japan from 2000-01 and a Visiting Scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA from 2006-07. Martin’s research activities are focused on particulate materials for materials science applications. It spans from shaping (compaction, sintering) to the behavior of materials elaborated from powders. Materials for energy applications (porous electrodes, nuclear pellets, MLCCs, thermoelectricity) represent typical applications. Discrete element simulations offer a natural and powerful tool for this research. A numerical tool, dp3D, specifically oriented toward materials science applications has been developed since 2001. Simulations are confronted to experimental observations, such as X-ray tomography.

Ludwig Gauckler, ETH, Professor, Switzerland

Title: Innovations Through Processing of Ceramics and Ceramic Composites

Biography: Gauckler received his degree in physics at the University of Stuttgart and his PhD in materials science in 1977. As senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Metals and Materials Research in Stuttgart he carried out research in the area of high performance structural and functional ceramics. He was research associate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1977. From 1979 to 1988 he was responsible for the inorganic non-metallic materials development in the central laboratories of Alusuisse-Lonza AG. Since 1988 he is Professor for “Nonmetallic Inorganic Materials” in the Department of Material Science at the ETH-Zurich. He served as head of the Department from 1991-1993. He was guest professor at the Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1993 and at the MIT, Boston in 2001. Gauckler and his co-workers received several awards for their work on colloid chemistry for ceramic processing and high temperature SOFCs, among them the Award for Real Advances in Materials from NASTS and the Federation of Materials Societies. He is Fellow of The American Ceramic Society and served as President of the scientific advisory board of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences. He is member of the Academy of Ceramics, and serves on the boards of several high-tech companies and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Electroceramics, Ceramic International and Materials Science and Engineering A. He has published over 180 scientific papers and holds 15 patents.

James J. Watkins, Director, Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing, University of Massachusetts

Title: Roll-to-Roll Processing of Functional Materials and Devices

Biography: Watkins earned his BS and MS in chemical engineering from The Johns Hopkins University in 1987 and 1988 respectively, and he earned his PhD in polymer science and engineering from the University of Massachusetts in 1997. His research interests include macromolecular templates for functional device structures, materials synthesis and processing in supercritical fluids, phase behavior and transport in multi-component polymer systems, scalable fabrication of nanostructure materials. Watkins has earned numerous honors and distinctions, including the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2000-05), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering (1998-2003), and the CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (1998-2002).