Professor Irene J. Beyerlein joined the UCSB Materials faculty as a member of the Structural Materials research group on July 1. Her primary appointment is in Mechanical Engineering. Prof. Beyerlein’s research focuses on the creation and design of advanced materials with unprecedented structural performance under extremes of strains, stress, and temperature. The overarching research goals will seek to understand and predict how to design and make novel lightweight materials that attain strengths nearer to their theoretical limits.
The materials Prof. Beyerlein will study include multi-phase microstructures or nanostructures that can be manufactured in sizes suitable for structural applications, which is critical for achieving the desired fuel economy and other critical performance metrics of a vast array of applications for our aircraft, aerospace, automotive, medical, space, energy and defense industries. The research builds and advances high-throughput computational materials science and aims to uncover and understand key deformation mechanisms, to model and predict prevailing defect interactions with internal grain boundaries and interfaces, and to simulate manufacturing processes in order to design pathways for target micro- or nanostructures.
Prof. Beyerlein will initiate new innovative research thrusts on new lightweight Mg and Ti alloys that meet the high engineering performance metrics that are needed for gaining marketplace acceptance, nanolayered multi-phase materials with an unusually high density of interfaces that significantly impact structural properties, advanced 3D, full-field spatially resolved mechanical modeling techniques with experimentally informed microstructures, and use of probability theory and dislocation theory to help bridge from the atomic scale, span the mesoscale length and time scales, to the macroscale where materials are tested in the laboratory.
Prof. Beyerlein was recently honored with the 2016 NSF ADVANCE STEM Professor Fellowship at the University of New Hampshire. In 2014, she received a fellowship to be a Visiting Professor at the University of Lorraine in Metz, France. Previously, Prof. Beyerlein received the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Distinguished Postdoc Mentor Award, LANL Fellow’s Prize, and International Journal of Plasticity Young Researcher Award. She received recognition for writing top-five and top-ten most-cited articles for Philosophical Magazine and International Journal of Plasticity, respectively. Prof. Beyerlein is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and serves as Editor of Acta Materialia and Scripta Materialia, as well as Associate Editor of Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology.
Prof. Beyerlein comes to UCSB Mechanical Engineering and Materials from LANL where she is the co-Director of the Energy Frontier Research Center. Prof. Beyerlein first went to LANL, where she has spent her career, as a J. R. Oppenheimer Fellow in 1997 after graduating with her Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University. Prof. Beyerlein earned her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University.
Welcome, Prof. Beyerlein!
