UT–ORNL Governor’s Chair for Advanced Alloy Theory and Development Easo George retired from UT on October 1 after serving in MSE for four years. He is planning to retire from ORNL next March.
George worked at ORNL from 1987 to 2014 and took a position as professor of materials design and director of the center for interface-dominated high-performance materials at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany before returning to ORNL in 2017 as the 15th Governor’s Chair.
George has graduated three PhD students and has three more planning to graduate within the next two years. He co-advised five other PhD students.
Of the classes he has taught for MSE, his favorites were mechanical properties of materials for senior undergraduates and first-years graduate students, and a class on phase transformations for graduate students.
George made several notable research accomplishments during his time as Governor’s Chair, including identifying thermal vacancies as the cause of anomalous strengthening at elevated temperatures in iron aluminides and developing a theory for it, demonstrating that grain boundaries in nickel aluminides are not intrinsically brittle—as was widely believed—and that embrittlement due to moisture in ordinary ambient air is the underlying cause, and identifying a clear hierarchy of creep cavity nucleation sites in ferrous alloys (sulfides are the worst offenders, oxides only in the presence of segregated sulfur, and carbides practically never).
George will miss the students and his wonderful colleagues in MSE the most during retirement.
Professor T. J. Nieh retired on July 31 after 17 years of loyal service and dedication to the department. H
1992, when he took a position as senior fellow of a research laboratory at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. He subsequently worked as a senior research fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before returning to UT in 2004.
Nieh is a world leader in superplasticity and superplastic forming and has been widely recognized for his work in multicomponent complex alloys, nanocrystalline materials, and lightweight alloys. He has published more than 400 papers and the textbook Superplasticity in Metals and Ceramics.
Nieh is a 2004 fellow of the Materials, Minerals, and Metallurgical Society and 1992 fellow of the American Society of Materials.
Professor Kurt Sickafus retired July 31 after 10 years in the department, returning to Los Alamos National Laboratory to manage the MST-8: Materials Science in Radiation and Dynamic Extremes group. He previously worked in the group for 22 years before joining UT.
Sickafus served as department head of MSE from 2011 to 2015 and as director of graduate affairs from 2016 until his retirement.
His notable accomplishments at UT include moving the department from Dougherty Engineering Building to its current home in Ferris Hall, reviving the undergraduate program, leading the annual graduate program assessment, and transforming the safety culture in the department.
His fondest memory is taking high school students in his MSE Governor’s School class to the Appalachian Museum in Norris, Tennessee.
“The pure joy on the faces of the students as they ran around the museum complex taking selfies with donkeys and peacocks was infectious,” said Sickafus. “I truly enjoyed that special event.”
Sickafus will miss teaching and interacting with the students as well as the many friends he has made over the past 10 years.