Professor David Srolovitz has made many important contributions to materials science and engineering during his career. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and will be receiving the Hume-Rothery award at TMS next year. He was visiting Michigan to present the Larry Van Vlack lecture and we were honored by his presence. Dave and Steve were grad students together at U. PA many years ago. Liz Holm, the UM Materials Science and Engineering chair was Dave's second PhD student when Dave was a professor at UM. Unfortunately, Dave's schedule was tight and the only time we were able to sit down with him was during Tim's class. So Liz graciously sat if for Tim and was this week's guest host. It was great to talk to Dave and Liz about his career, teaching, research, AI, and other topics. We even found out where Dave gets his best ideas! Dave is currently the Dean of Engineering at Hong Kong University.

You can find the YouTube version here:

Our YouTube channel can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/@Undercooled.Materials

This episode is sponsored by the University of Michigan Materials Science and Engineering department (https://mse.engin.umich.edu).

Steve and Tim talked with Professor John Allison about Integrated Computational Manufacturing Engineering (ICME) and his PRISMS center. John talked about how creating the Virtual Aluminum Casting program at Ford led to the ability to predict properties of the as cast aluminum engine blocks to the point where they were perfect the first time. This vastly improved the time to develop new products for Ford and helped significantly to the development of lighter weight vehicles. John also talked about his current role in helping improve the recycling of aluminum waste for large scale castings using ICME. John also talks about his new PRISMS center, Magnesium alloys, the importance of team dynamics in accomplishing his work, and how he got into materials science and engineering.

You can learn more about the PRISMS center here:
https://prisms-center.org/#/home

You can find the YouTube version here:
https://youtu.be/pF0YSMdrNBA

Our YouTube channel can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/@Undercooled.Materials

This episode is sponsored by the University of Michigan Materials Science and Engineering department (https://mse.engin.umich.edu).

Tim and Steve talked with Lily Turaski from Georgia Tech at the NAMES conference in August, 2025. Today's episode focuses on engineering education research. We discussed the importance of education research and how it applies to actually teaching, what are the barriers to adoption of research-based teaching strategies, and important problems in education research. We also discussed some preliminary results from Lily's ongoing research in materials education.

You can find the YouTube version here:
https://youtu.be/MzkBTuO2sJ0
Check out the video version to see the visual presentation of research results!

This episode is sponsored by the University of Michigan Materials Science and Engineering department (https://mse.engin.umich.edu).