It is our great pleasure to introduce you to two new faculty members starting this fall!

Irene Beyerlein joined the Department in July 2016. Most recently, she served as co-director of the Energy Frontier Research Center at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where she started as a J.R. Oppenheimer Fellow in 1997 after earning her PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell University. She received the LANL Distinguished Postdoc Mentor Award, the LANL Fellow's Prize, and the International Journal of Plasticity's Young Researcher Award. She received recognition for writing top-five and top-ten most-cited articles for Philosophical Magazine and International Journal of Plasticity, respectively, and she serves as Editor of Acta Materialia and Scripta Materialia and as Associate Editor of the Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, received a visitn professor fellowship at the University of Lorraine, and was most recently honored with the 2016 NSF ADVANCE STEM Professor Fellowship at the University of New Hampshire.

Prof. Beyerlein's research focuses on the creation and design of advanced, lightweight materials with unprecedented structural performance under extreme strain, stress, and temperature. These features are critical for achieving improved fuel economy, as well as a other critical performance metrics, in applications for aircraft, aerospace, automotive, medical, space, energy, and military industries. 

Samantha Daly joined the Department as an Associate Professor July 2016. She earned her MS and PhD in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech, then joined the faculty at the University of  Michigan before her move to UCSB in 2016. Her interests lie at the intersection of experimental mechanics  and materials science, with an emphasis on using novel methods of experimentation coupled closely with theoretical and computational modeling. She was granted the NSF’s CAREER Award, the Eshelby Mechanics Award, the Journal of Strain Analysis Young Investigator Award, the Best Paper of the Year Award from Experimental Mechanics, the Best Paper of the Year Award from IJSS, the DOE Early Career Award, the AFOSR-YIP Award, the ASME Orr Award, the Caddell Award, anda number of teaching recognitions.

Here at UCSB, Prof. Daly’s research group focuses on the statistical quantification of microstructural features  of materials and their effect on meso- and macro-scale properties. Currently, the group is engaged in the development of novel methods of multi-scale material characterization, with application to active materials, high temperature ceramics, very high cycle and low cycle fatigue mechanisms, plasticity, fracture, and material behavior at the nano-scale. Most of all, she looks forward to collaborating on the statistical examination of the mechanics of hierarchical materials, and the development of new methods of experimentation in order to more fully understand how advanced materials deform and fail.