Kickoff for new technical committee featured reps from DoD research organizations, NSF, NIST

Natasha Vermaak, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics, is the founding chair of a new Technical Committee for the Design of Engineering Materials (DEM TC) within the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

She recently organized a kick-off symposium for the technical committee, with co-chair Dr. Andy Gaynor (U.S. Army Research Laboratory), on “Perspectives from Division Directors, Program Managers, and Center Leadership on Materials by Design Challenges,” which took place at the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (November 2019, Salt Lake City). Presenters at the symposium included division directors from the Office of Naval Research and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; program managers from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; and directors from several prominent related centers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California, Irvine.

Traditionally engineering design involves material selection and lay-out or configuration. With recent advancements in computational materials science, computational design and optimization techniques, informatics, manufacturing, and processing over the past two decades, the design of engineering materials (DEM) extends this activity to include the material structure and processing levels. This symposium was a unique gathering of stakeholders and leaders in the DEM field that allowed for insights into their views on new directions and challenges in interdisciplinary materials design. A summary of symposium highlights is forthcoming and will be available through the DEM TC website.

The Design of Engineering Materials Technical Committee (DEM TC) has the expressed mission to further the development of a sustainable interdisciplinary community dedicated to understanding materials design problems. The scope of the DEM TC is to serve as a platform for facilitating collaborations and disseminating information advancing materials by design approaches, algorithms, and applications. While materials design themes are often apparent across divisions and disciplines within ASME-IMECE programming, there had previously been no central “home” committee.

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symposium poster
Natasha Vermaak

Mechanical engineering professor Natasha Vermaak is the founding chair of a new Technical Committee for the Design of Engineering Materials within the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Photo by John Kish IV Photography