HKIAS News

 

Professor David J. Srolovitz, a leading scholar in theoretical and computational materials science, presented a lecture series titled "Grain Boundary Structure and Dynamics: a tutorial" as part of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) Distinguished Tutorial Series in Materials Science at City University of Hong Kong (CityU). The tutorial series is composed of four enlightening lectures and is sponsored by a generous donation from the Kwang Hua Educational Foundation.

Grain boundaries have been widely studied for nearly a century, the understanding of these important defects has grown rapidly in recent years. Throughout four lectures, Professor Srolovitz, Senior Fellow of HKIAS and Chair Professor of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at CityU provided a contemporary view of grain boundaries and hands-on tutorial that walked through the development of a predictive and coherent understanding of grain boundary structure, energetics, and motion from the atomistic to continuum scales. Moreover, he synthesized thermodynamic, crystallographic, statistical mechanics, and kinetic descriptions of grain boundary structure and behaviour.

This tutorial series is designed for students who are new to the field of grain boundary, and scientists or engineers who are from peripheral areas seeking an update of recent development. Topics covered a rudimentary understanding of elasticity, statistical mechanics, crystallography, and crystal defect. The theme for each tutorial is as follows:

Lecture 1: Grain boundary basics, dislocations, steps, crystallography, structural units

Lecture 2: Grain boundary energy, metastability, defects

Lecture 3: Grain boundary dynamics

Lecture 4: Grain boundaries in polycrystals – microstructure, plasticity, point defects

Professor Srolovitz did a PhD in Materials Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a post-doc at the Exxon Corporate Research Laboratory, followed by a staff position in the Theory Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was a professor of Materials Science & Engineering and of Applied Physics at the University of Michigan, professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Materials Science, and Applied Mathematics at Princeton University, professor of Physics at Yeshiva University, and professor of Materials Science & Engineering, Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics, and Computer & Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the Executive Director of the Institute of High Performance Computing (Singapore) and served variously as a department chair and dean. Amongst his many awards is membership of the US National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of MRS, TMS, ASM, and Institute of Physics and is the winner of the MRS Materials Theory Award. He joined the City University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study in 2018.

Video and Powerpoint for the four lectures are available on the HKIAS website.

 

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