A symposium honoring Distinguished Professor Marc Meyers for his 42 years of uninterrupted dedication to the field of dynamic behavior of materials as a researcher, teacher, organizer, and leader was held at the February TMS-2014 Annual Meeting & Exhibition, in San Diego.
The symposium had the participation of approximately 100 scholars from the US, Russia, Germany, France, Great Britain, Greece, Brazil, and Argentina.
Prominent organizational and scientific activities by Marc Meyers celebrated in this meeting were:
• He participated in the creation of the Laboratory for Welding and Shocking of Metals at the Military Institute of Engineering, Brazil, the first in Latin America.
• He was the co-founder of the Center for Explosives Technology Research at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and its Associate Director.
• He co-founded, with Dr. L. E. Murr, the highly successful conference series EXPLOMET, which ranged from 1980 to 2000. This was followed by six symposia on dynamic behavior of materials at TMS, also under his initiative.
• He co-organized and co-chaired (with Prof. Sergio Neves Monteiro) the 2010 Inter American Materials Congress and the 2014 Pan American Materials Conference in Sao Paulo.
• In the U. S. Army Research Office, he coordinated and oversaw the Army-supported research on dynamic behavior of materials. This was a period of significant funding ramp-up with the Armor-Anti -Armor program.
• With DR. L. E. Murr, he created the John Rinehart Award which is managed by the European Association DYMAT and recognizes excellence in this field worldwide. It is awarded every three years.
• He organized short courses at UCSD and developed a class on the subject, which led to the publication of “Dynamic Behavior of Materials,” used worldwide and translated into Chinese.
• He spearheaded, with LLNL colleagues, the application of short laser-generated pulses to study materials in a regime not accessible before. The principal recognition from his research comes from:
• His mechanism for homogeneous dislocation generation in shock compression which is an important component of modern understanding on the subject and has been confirmed by observation and simulations.
• His pioneering use of tensile pulses to establish the thermodynamic and kinetic parameters of martensitic transformations.
• His proposal that dynamic recrystallization plays a pivotal role in shear localization and the mechanism he developed.
• The experimental and analytical treatment of the self organization of shear bands, jointly with V. F. Nesterenko.
• The proposal, with V. Lubarda of a new dislocation mechanism for void growth in ductile failure.
• The quantification and successful prediction of a threshold pressure for twinning in shock compression.
In addition to his 25 year tenure at UCSD, Marc Meyers, has had visiting appointments in Japan (Tsukuba), China (IMR, Shenyang), England (Cambridge U.), France (U. of Lorraine), Germany (Karlsruhe Ins. Techn.), and Brazil (Military Inst. Eng.). He is a Fellow of TMS and American Physical Society and he received ASM Society Albert Sauveur Award and Reinhart Award from European DYMAT Association.