Irene Jane Beyerlein (born November 1971) is an American materials scientist who is the Mehrabian Interdisciplinary Endowed Chair at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

. She is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society.

Early life and education

Beyerlein was born in

Los Alamos, New Mexico Los Alamos is an census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, that is recognized as the development and creation place of the atomic bomb—the primary objective of the Manhattan Project by Los Alamos National Labora ...

. She completed undergraduate studies at Clemson University. After her junior year she realized that she was interested mathematics and materials, and decided to major in mechanical engineering. She moved to

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

for graduate studies, where she studied fibrous composites. After earning her doctorate, Beyerlein joined the

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

as an

J. R. Oppenheimer J. Robert Oppenheimer (; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physics, theoretical physicist. A professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Lab ...

Fellow. She spent three years as a research fellow before being appointed to the faculty at the LANL.

Research and career

Beyerlein worked as a theorist at

for several years, where she was co-director of the Energy Frontiers Research Center. In 2016, Beyerlein joined the

. Beyerlein's research considers the design of materials that can withstand extreme conditions, including high stress, temperature and strain. She has studied how plastic deformations propagate through materials and how strain localization can give rise to the initiation of slip bands. She is particularly interested in how lightweight materials that can improve fuel economy in aircraft. Beyerlein is the editor of '' Scripta Materialia'' and on the editorial board of ''

Acta Materialia ''Acta Materialia'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published twenty times per year on behalf of Acta Materialia Inc. The current publisher is Elsevier. The coordinating editor is Christopher A. Schuh, Danae and Vasilis Salapatas Professor ...

''. In 2019, Beyerlein was recognized as a Brimacombe Medalist by The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society for her "groundbreaking work on the plasticity of HCP metals and metal

nanocomposites Nanocomposite is a multiphase solid material where one of the phases has one, two or three dimensions of less than 100 nanometers (nm) or structures having nano-scale repeat distances between the different phases that make up the material. The id ...

as well as for her commitment to mentorship of the next generation of materials scientists." To date, Beyerlein has published over 500 academic manuscripts, and has been cited over 20,000 times, resulting in an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as winn ...

and i10-index of 82 and 301 respectively.

Awards and honors

* 2012

Fellows' Prize * 2013 International Journal of Plasticity Young Research Award * 2014 Distinguished Mentor Award * 2016

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party *National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political gr ...

ADVANCE STEM Professor Fellowship * 2018 The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society Distinguished Scientist/Engineering Award * 2018 The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society Brimacombe Medalist *2019 AIME Champion H. Mathewson Award * 2021 Elected Fellow of the Materials Research Society * 2021 LMD Magnesium Technology Award - Best Poster

Selected publications

* * * *Marcel Risse, Martin Lentz, Christoph Fahrenson, Walter Reimers, Marko Knezevic and Irene J. Beyerlein. Elevated Temperature Effects on the Plastic Anisotropy of an Extruded Mg-4 Wt Pct Li Alloy: Experiments and Polycrystal Modeling. Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A volume 48, pages 446–458 (2017). doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11661-016-3780-4

Personal life

Beyerlein is a

road cyclist Road cycling is the most widespread form of cycling in which cyclists ride on paved roadways. It includes recreational, racing, commuting, and utility cycling. As users of the road, road cyclists are generally expected to obey the same laws as ...

, and was named

State Cycling Champion in 2005 and 2010.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Beyerlein, Irene Jane 21st-century American women scientists People from Los Alamos, New Mexico 21st-century women engineers American women engineers Engineers from New Mexico Clemson University alumni Cornell University alumni University of California, Santa Barbara faculty American materials scientists 1971 births Living people