AAE Assistant Professor, Vikas Tomar, receives Honorable Mention Award

Vikas Tomar, Assistant Professor in Aeronautics and Astronautics, receives Honorable Mention Award for Early Career Faculty Fellow at the TMS-AIME Annual Awards Banquet that was held on Feb. 16th in Seattle.

This award recognizes an assistant professor for his or her accomplishments that have advanced the academic institution where employed, and for abilities to broaden the technological profile of TMS.

The recognition of outstanding accomplishments by members of the international minerals, metals, and materials community is one of the primary obejectives of TMS. In the society's view, the bestowal of honors and awards is necessary to not only reward distinguished performances by a scientist or engineer, but to encourage his or her colleagues to strive toward the same--and perhaps greater--level of distinction.

Dr. Tomar's main research thrust is in the area of computationally and experimentally analyzing new classes of ceramics matrix composites for extreme environments with a view of applications such as nuclear environments, nanoscale high voltage ionized environments, and high temperature environments. Another thrust is in analyzing bio-motivated polymer matrix composites such as tropocollagen (TC)-hyrodxyapatite. (HAP) materials and their use in structural mechanics, medicine, and energy related applications. The emphasis is on primarily understanding the interplay of length scale and time scale related effects which could be manipulated in order to either develop new technologies or modify the existing technologies for serving aerospace, energy, and medicine fields. Research methods are based on, but not limited to, using cohesive finite element method, molecular dynamics method, Monte Carlo method, and quantum mechanical simulations and combining them with Scanning Probe Microscopy, Electron Microscopy, and nanoscale mechanical testing approaches for nanoscale fatigue and fracture strength measurements.

To find out more about Dr. Tomar and his reasearch, visit his website by clicking here.