Diana Lados, Milton Prince Higgins II Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and the founder and director of WPI’s Integrative Materials Design Center (iMdc), has been elected to the board of trustees of ASM International. Lados, who was elected a fellow of ASM International in 2017, is one of three new trustees recently elected to three-year terms on the nine-member board, which includes leaders from industry, academia, and professional organizations in three nations.
Lados was also recently elected a fellow of Alpha Sigma Mu (AΣM), the international professional honor society for materials science and engineering in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the field of materials science and engineering. Currently vice president of the society (and also WPI AΣM Chapter faculty advisor), she will begin a three-year team as AΣM president next fall at Materials Science & Technology 2019 in Portland, Ore., a comprehensive annual forum on materials science and engineering organized in a joint partnership by four professional societies, including ASM International.

board of directors in a photo taken during Materials Science
& Technology 2018.
A full-time faculty member at WPI since 2006, Lados conducts fundamental research in the areas of materials and advanced manufacturing, with a special focus on design, evaluation, characterization, and optimization for fatigue, fatigue crack growth, thermo-mechanical fatigue, creep, and fracture resistance. Her work has established fundamental relationships between the microstructures of materials and their behavior and properties; shed light on underlying failure mechanisms, critical considerations in the material-process optimization; and developed computational models that link the performance of materials to their manufacturing processes and accurately predict component life. Her discoveries have had a major impact on materials processing and manufacturing and design, and have found broad and diverse use in critical high-integrity structural and engine applications in all transportation industries.
Lados has integrated the knowledge, databases, tools, and strategies she has developed into a unified methodology for sustainable material-process-component design and manufacturing for high-performance and reliability, creating interdisciplinary bridges between materials science, mechanical engineering, and physics. This integrated material design approach is reflected in the mission of iMdc, which Lados founded and has led since 2007. An industry-government-university research and educational alliance, iMdc has more than 35 members representing the transportation and defense industries and their suppliers, materials producers, manufacturing and testing facilities, equipment manufacturers, government organizations, and national laboratories, and has established key collaborations with universities around the world, including a new partnership with University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna.