Bio
Dr. T. A. Venkatesh is currently an Associate Professor in the Materials Science and Chemical Engineering department at Stony Brook University. He received his doctoral degree in Materials Science and Engineering and also obtained a minor in business administration from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. Through modeling and experimental approaches, his research group is focused on understanding material behaviour such as mechanical strength, cracking, environmental effects, fatigue and high temperature responses and in developing materials with long-term durability and reliability, which are applicable to systems such as off-shore wind farms. He is the recipient of National Science Foundation’s Early Career Award for his efforts to understand fatigue behaviour of materials. He is also the principal investigator, leading a large, multi-disciplinary University-National Laboratory-Industry effort, with MIT and Stanford, in developing advanced materials for the hydrogen economy. Alongside research in materials science, Dr. Venkatesh is also interested in understanding innovations and their influences on market dynamics and assessing market animations for breakthrough technologies.

Bio
Taher Saif is Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at University of Illinois. He received the Engineering Science Medal from the Society of Engineering Science in 2020, and the Warner T. Koiter Medal from ASME Applied Mechanics Division in 2018. He was a Distinguished Visiting Professor with Leibniz Institute for New Materials, Saarbrücken, Germany, in 2019, and a Visiting Professor with Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, in 2011. His research focuses on the mechanics of nanoscale materials and living cells. He uses both theory and experiment to explore (1) the effect of size on the mechanics of materials, and (2) the role of mechanical force in determining the functionality of cells and cell clusters.

Bio
Ting Zhu is a Woodruff Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004. He worked as a postdoctoral associate at Harvard University before joining Georgia Tech in 2005. His research is focused on mechanics and materials modeling. He received the Sia Nemat-Nasser Early Career Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Young Investigator Medal from the Society of Engineering Science. His research focuses on the modeling and simulation of mechanical behavior of materials at the nano- to macroscale.

Bio
Cem Tasan is Thomas B. King Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. He explores the boundaries of physical metallurgy, solid mechanics, and in-situ microscopy, in order to design new alloys with exceptional damage-resistance. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanics of Materials from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Following postdoctoral work at Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung in Germany, he was appointed as a Group Leader there, leading the Adaptive Structural Materials group until joining MIT in 2016. His group at MIT mainly focuses on (i) developing new in-situ characterization tools and methods, (ii) improving the physical understanding of transformation, deformation, damage micro-mechanisms in metallic materials; (iii) designing damage-resistant microstructures and alloys.

Bio
Nam-Joon Cho is the MRS-Chair Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research activities focus on biointerfacial science approaches to solve important biomedical problems and translate these capabilities into practical applications for global health. Key research activities include model membrane platforms for biological surface science, acoustic and optical biosensor applications, pollen-based biomaterials, tissue engineering, and the development of membrane-active antimicrobial strategies. His research team has published over 270 scientific papers in top journals such as Nature Materials, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, Nature Protocols, Science Translational Medicine, Science Advances, Advanced Materials, ACS Nano, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Dr. Cho’s scientific work has been highlighted by international media organizations such as Reuters, CNBC, and Businessweek, and has led to licensed technologies in the fields of antiviral medicine, biomaterials, and biotechnology. He is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.