5/31/2022 3 min read
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The ninth edition of the TMS Frontiers in Solidification symposium series will be dedicated to MechSE professor emeritus Jonathan A. Dantzig, a recognized world leader in the field of solidification, casting, and computational modelling of materials processing and microstructure development. It will be held March 19-23, 2023 in San Diego.
Starting his career in process modelling, Dantzig later tackled more fundamental aspects of solidification modeling at the microstructure level. Therefore, TMS has announced this edition of the symposium is particularly focused on process and microstructure modeling, even though contributions across the entire field of solidification are welcome.
Professor Dantzig received his undergraduate and graduate degrees at The Johns Hopkins University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1977. His thesis co-advisors, Stephen Davis and Robert Pond, Sr., taught him the importance of modeling and experimental verification that served as the cornerstones of his career. His first post-graduate job was at Olin Metals Research Laboratories, where he applied these skills to the study of degassing of Al alloys and DC casting with rotating magnetic fields. He is co-inventor on 20 U.S. patents derived from that work.
In 1982, he moved to the University of Illinois, where he studied solidification processing of aluminum, cast iron, steel, and other alloys, at scales ranging from nanometers to meters. Most of his master’s and Ph.D. students have gone on to work in the ground vehicle industry, including Ford, GM, Cummins, and Caterpillar, among others. In 2008, he retired as W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professor of Mechanical Engineering, after which he continued his career as both research professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and invited professor at EPFL in Switzerland. Dantzig has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching and research, including the Bruce Chalmers Award and Distinguished Educator Award from TMS and the Brimacombe Prize. He has co-authored about 100 journal articles and two textbooks. He continues to teach in an annual short course on solidification for industrial and academic researchers, and to engage in research with colleagues in academia and industry
Specific areas of focus for the 2023 honorary symposium include: fundamental aspects of solidification which advance our understanding of how microstructures develop and evolve during solidification experiments or processes; contributions which put forward original interpretations, observations of novel phenomena, and outstanding challenges from both fundamental and applied perspectives, as well as transfer of fundamental knowledge to practical applications; investigation methods including theory, experiments, characterization, modeling across all relevant length and time scales, as well as data-driven approaches; and contributions that combine novel characterization techniques, challenging property measurements, and computational simulations across scales.