David Seidman Receives Honor from ASM International

September 19, 2006

David N. Seidman, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, is the recipient the Albert Sauveur Achievement Award from ASM International. He will receive the award at the ASM International meeting in October 2006.

The Albert Sauveur Achievement Award is given to individuals who have made "pioneering materials science and engineering achievements that stimulated organized work to an extent that a marked basic advance has been made in materials science and engineering knowledge." The citation for this award reads, "For seminal and sustained applications of field-ion and atom-probe microscopies to numerous fundamental and technologically important problems in physical metallurgy and materials science over a thirty-year period."

Seidman's research focuses on understanding the atomistic mechanisms for the temporal evolution of the nano- and mesoscopic structures of technologically important alloys for use at elevated temperatures (nickel-, aluminum-, and titanium-based alloys), both experimentally and via atomistic computer simulations. He is also involved in the development of an explosion resistant high-strength low-alloy steel, which is precipitation strengthened, for the Office of Naval Research. Seidman is also pursuing the question of the three-dimensional distributions of dopants in silicon at an atomic scale. His research involves the use of a unique instrument, the local-electrode atom-probe (LEAP) tomograph, which provides chemical compositional information on a subnanoscale in three-dimensions.

Seidman was twice chosen as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, was an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Fellow at Institut für Metallphysik der Universität Göttingen, and received a Max Planck Research Prize of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and the Alexander Von Humboldt Stiftung.

He is also a Fellow of the TMS (Minerals•Metals•Materials), ASM International, and the American Physical Society (Division of Condensed Matter Physics), and was awarded the Robert Lansing Hardy Gold Medal of the former society. Seidman is currently an editor of the Journal of Materials Science, was editor-in-chief of Interface Science, and has edited many special issues of proceedings of scientific meetings in addition to numerous scientific publications. He has had extensive stays at institutions in France, Germany, Israel and the United States. Seidman is founder and director of the Northwestern University Center for Atom-Probe Tomography (NUCAPT), a central facility of the National Science Foundation Funded Materials Research Center.