Greg Olson Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Gregory B. Olson, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy research centers.

This year, 220 new members were elected to the Academy, including eight other professors from Northwestern.

A designer of high-performance alloys, Olson is considered a founder of computational materials design. He directs the Materials Technology Laboratory/Steel Research Group at McCormick. Olson developed a systematic science-based approach for designing structural materials that takes the desired properties and calculates the optimum composition and processing route. Beyond materials design, his research interests include phase transformations, structure/property relationships and applications of high-resolution microanalysis.

Olson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 1997, he founded QuesTek Innovations LLC, a materials design company whose first creation was a high-performance steel for gears that was designed at Northwestern and licensed to the company. December 17, 2010 marked the historic first flight of QuesTek's Ferrium S53 aircraft landing gear steel, the first fully computationally designed and flight-qualified material.

“Election to the Academy is both an honor for extraordinary accomplishment and a call to serve,” said Academy President Leslie C. Berlowitz. “We look forward to drawing on the knowledge and expertise of these distinguished men and women to advance solutions to the pressing policy challenges of the day.”

Other Northwestern professors elected include:

• Sir J. Fraser Stoddart, Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry
• David Theodore Van Zanten, Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art and Art History
• Alice Hendrickson Eagly, James Padilla Chair of Arts and Sciences; Professor of Psychology
• James Allison Brown, Professor of Anthropology
• Shari Seidman Diamond, Howard J. Trienens Professor of Law, Professor of Psychology
• Ehud Kalai, James J. O'Connor Distinguished Professor of Decision and Game Sciences, Director of the Center for Strategic Decision Making
• Kenneth Ludwig Alder, Professor of History; Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities
• James N. Druckman, Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research