Conference Chairs

Professor Gwénaëlle Proust | University of Sydney

Gwénaëlle Proust is a Professor of Materials Engineering in the School of Civil Engineering and the Director of the Sydney Manufacturing Hub at the University of Sydney.
She received her Diplôme d’ingénieur (eq. BE) in Materials Science in 1999 from the Institut des Sciences de l’Ingénieur en Thermique Energétique et Matériaux (present name: Ecole Polytechnique de Nantes) in Nantes, France. She was awarded her MPhil in 2002 and her PhD in 2005 from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA. She then did a two-year post-doc at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. She joined the University of Sydney in 2008.

Her research aims at understanding the relationships between material properties and their microstructure and to improve material performance, ultimately leading to energy savings and to safer, more efficient devices. Her research projects encompass investigating and modelling manufacturing processes of materials. She also looks at the effects of mechanical deformation on the microstructure evolution of metals, understanding the effects of complex loading on the mechanical response of materials. The experimental aspect of her work is carried out using manufacturing techniques such as additive manufacturing and characterisation techniques such as optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and electron backscatter diffraction.

She has published over 100 papers to date and has attracted funding via the ARC Linkage and Discovery schemes.

Professor Sophie Primig | UNSW Sydney

Sophie Primig currently is a Professor in the School of Materials Science & Engineering at UNSW Sydney. She was awarded both her MEng (2008) and PhD (2012) in Materials Science & Engineering from Montanuniversitaet Leoben, Austria. Following a short period as Post-Doctoral Researcher and an academic position at the same University, she moved to UNSW Sydney in 2015, initially as Lecturer. She was an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow from 2018-2020.

Her research interests are in Physical Metallurgy. She has a track record in both fundamental and applied research. Her research goal is to develop an advanced capability in structure-property relationships across the processing routes of structural metallic materials via additive manufacturing and advanced thermo-mechanical routes. The focus of her applied research is aerospace alloys, and this has often been linked closely to the needs of industrial partners. She has published  >100 papers to date.

Sophie has attracted funding via the ARC Linkage and Discovery schemes, industry collaborations, and the Australia-US Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Program. She is an Editor of Journal of Materials Science, Vice Chair of the TMS Phase Transformations Committee, and former President of the Materials Australia NSW Branch.

For further information about APCIAM2023, contact Tanya Smith on tanya@materialsaustralia.com.au or +61 3 9326 7266.