Alexander H. KingThe 2019 recipient of the Acta Materialia Hollomon Award for Materials and Society is Dr. Alexander H. King, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University. Dr. King will receive his award during the 2019 TMS Spring Meeting and Exhibition in San Antonio, Texas.
Dr. King recently completed a five-year term as the founder and Director of the US Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute – one of DOE’s four Energy Innovation Hubs. He is also a former Director of DOE’s Ames Laboratory, in Ames, Iowa. The Critical Materials Institute is a consortium of four DOE national labs, seven universities and a dozen corporations, and is considered to be a model of collaboration and productivity. It is one of four Energy Innovation Hubs formed to accelerate scientific discovery of critical energy technologies.
Dr. King was born and raised in London. He was an undergraduate at the University of Sheffield and earned his doctorate from Oxford. He was a post doctoral fellow at Oxford and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he also served as the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies (Dean of the Graduate School). He was the Head of the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue in from 1999 to 2007, the Director of DOE’s Ames Laboratory from 2008 until 2013, and became the Founding Director of the Critical Materials Institute when the Ames Lab was awarded its funding.
Dr. King is a Fellow of the Institute of Mining Minerals and Materials; ASM International; and the Materials Research Society. He was also a Visiting Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1996 and a US Department of State Jefferson Science Fellow for 2005-06.
He served as the President of MRS for 2002, Chair of the University Materials Council of North America for 2006-07, Co-chair of the Gordon Conference on Physical Metallurgy for 2006, and Chair of the APS Interest Group on Energy Research and Applications for 2010.
In 2013, Dr.King delivered a TEDx talk on critical materials and was the TMS & ASM Distinguished Lecturer on Materials and Society in 2017. He maintains research interests in the atomic-scale behavior of grain boundaries, but most of his recent work has focused on understanding the dynamics of materials supply-chain failures and implementing effective strategies to avoid or alleviate them.