Dr. Garritt J. Tucker, Eula Mae and John Baugh Endowed Chair in Physics and program Chair for Materials Science and Engineering at Baylor University will give a seminr titled "Harnessing Nanoscale Heterogeneities and Mechanisms for Next-Generation Materials Design: Guiding Insights from Modeling and Cross-Disciplinary Research Integration" to the interested faculty and students at Discovery Park.

Abstract

Tuning the functional properties (e.g., electronic, optical, mechanical, and thermal) of materials, often depend upon controlling the competition and/or cooperation between fundamental  mechanisms starting at the atomic scale. While materials performance is ultimately realized at the macroscale, nanoscale behavior often governs the most fundamental and promising materials properties. Accordingly, a long-standing challenge in Materials Science is to develop more predictive, and physically-informed, relationships between multiscale structure and properties to enable new materials with tailored performance metrics. In this talk, a few recent research examples will be provided toward how both heterogeneities and deformation mechanisms in materials are facilitating the discovery and design of new properties – enabling new areas of research integration in materials science. Specific focus will be on the use of computational modeling at the nanoscale to complement innovative experimental efforts to understand the role of defects. We have synced both atomistic simulations and atomic probe tomography mappings of microstructure and chemical segregation in nanostructured materials to properly interpret the origins of maximum strength. Novel mechanisms and behaviors were quantified for the first-time to rationalize decades of experimental testing data toward developing stronger materials through microstructural design and alloying. Finally, newly developed approaches to improve our quantification of structure, differentiating order and disorder, and providing avenues for fingerprinting key structural environments will be discussed in the context of next-generation materials design.

Bio

Professor Tucker is the Eula Mae and John Baugh Endowed Chair in Physics, and the program Chair for Materials Science and Engineering at Baylor University. He earned his Ph.D. in 2011 from the Georgia Institute of Technology from the School of Materials Science and Engineering while earning research distinction in the division of Mechanics of Materials, and a B.S. in 2004 from Westminster College in Salt Lake City, UT majoring in both Physics and Mathematics. While at Westminster, he was also an Academic All-American as a co-captain on the varsity soccer team.

He is the Principal Investigator of the Computational Materials Science and Design research group at Baylor and is co-Director of the Point-Of-Need Innovation (PONI) manufacturing center. He joined the faculty at Baylor in the summer of 2023. Before moving his research group to Baylor, he spent 6 years at the Colorado School of Mines (Golden, CO) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, 4 years as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University (Philadelphia, PA), and 2 years as a Postdoctoral Research Appointee at Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, NM) in the Computational Materials and Data Science group.

Tucker has received several distinctions including: the Outstanding Teacher Award at Drexel University and the TMS Society’s Young Leader Professional Development Award for his work in computational materials science. His research ambitions are aimed at integrating high-performance computing, materials theory, and novel computational tools to discover the fundamental structure-property relationships of emerging materials that will enable the predictive design of advanced materials with tunable properties. At the core of Prof. Tucker’s research group approach is to develop collaborations and programs that effectively mesh computation with experiment to tailor functional materials.