Materials Scientist Ian McCue Joins MSE Faculty

Northwestern University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering has welcomed Ian McCue to its faculty as an assistant professor. McCue joins the McCormick School of Engineering after serving as a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University and a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

McCue earned his PhD and bachelor’s degrees from Johns Hopkins University, both in materials science and engineering.

His research vision is to solve the problem of scalable processing for advanced, nanostructured materials by focusing on advanced manufacturing and self-organization phenomena. In particular, he is interested in developing these materials for extreme environments (high enthalpy, radiation, and strain rate) because they are high-value application spaces that often push materials past their limits. McCue is interested in pushing the boundaries of microstructural control during fabrication to create new materials that are stronger, tougher, more thermally stable, and even capable of repairing themselves.
 
This research is split across three key thrusts:

• new manufacturing process to create advanced nanocomposites for structural applications
• studying the mechanical behavior of bulk nanostructured materials
• advancing the fundamental understanding between material architecture – curvature, microstructural length scale, and composition – diffusion pathways, external fields, and phase transformations.

McCue recently received an early-faculty award from NASA. The work is consistent with McCue’s research vision: he will be studying how to form (tough and strong) nanostructured bonds that enable the use of shape memory alloys in extreme space applications (superelastic airless tires, rocksplitters, and self-deploying structures).