Nanostructural design of ultrafine-grained materials for achieving superior multifunctional properties

Prof. Jian Wang is Wilmer J. and Sally L. Hergenrader Presidential Chair of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln since 2015. He received his PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2006 and worked as technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) until 2015. His research focuses on quantitatively exploring the structure-properties relations of materials using multi-scale theory, modeling and experimental methods and techniques. He was awarded the LANL Distinguished Postdoctoral Performance Award (2009), the LDRD/Early Career Award (2011), TMS MPMD Young Leader Award (2013), International Plasticity Young Research Award (2015), Materials Today Rising Star Award in the category of Materials Genome Innovation (2018), TMS MPMD Distinguished Scientist Award (2022) and TMS BRIMACOMBE MEDALIST Award (2023). He is Fellow of ASME and Fellow of ASM International. He served as Editorial Board of International Journal of Plasticity (2015~), Materials Research Letters (2016~), and others. He has published more than ~400 peer-reviewed papers (> 28,000 citations and H-index = 94; 10 papers featured as Journal cover).

Prof. Ruslan Z. Valiev is Director of the Institute of Physics of Advanced Materials and Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Physics of Metals at Ufa University of Science and Technology, Russia. He also served as Supervisor of the Laboratory for Mechanics of Advanced Nanomaterials at Saint Petersburg State University, a laboratory supported by the Government of the Russian Federation. In recognition of his outstanding scientific achievements, he was elected as a Member of the European Academy of Sciences (EAS) in 2009 and of other academic institutions. Presently, he is also a Principal Investigator with the Herbert Gleiter International Institute (Liaoning Academy of Materials, Shenyang, China).
Professor Valiev is internationally renowned as a pioneer in the field of severe plastic deformation (SPD). He was among the first scientists in the world to discover and establish the principles for producing bulk nanostructured metallic materials through SPD techniques. His research has fundamentally advanced the understanding of nanostructured metals and alloys, enabling remarkable improvements in their structural and functional properties and accelerating their applications in engineering, aerospace, energy, and biomedical fields. His studies are reflected in over 900 articles in archival scientific journals, over 13 well-known monographs, and special issues and reviews. He is among the most highly-cited scientists in the world in the area of nanomaterial science: the total number of citations exceeds 63,000 times (WoS), and his h-index = 113. He was ranked as top 2% leading scientists of the world based on the publicly available database by Stanford University and ranked #1 for Overall Highly Ranked Scholars in Russia by ScholarGPS.
Throughout his distinguished career, Professor Valiev has received numerous prestigious honors, including the European Academy of Sciences Blaise Pascal Medal in Materials Science (2011), the First Annual Materials Science and Engineering A (MSEA) Journal Prize (2010), Scopus Awards Russia (2011, 2014), the TMS Fellow Award and Somiya Award (2015), the Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher Russia Award (2017), the THERMEC Distinguished Award (2023) and the Academician G.V. Kurdyumov Medal of Honour for outstanding achievements in the field of physical metallurgy (2024). He is also the founding member and Chairman of the International NanoSPD Steering Committee, playing a leading role in shaping the global development of nanostructured materials research.