Allison Beese, a materials scientist in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS), has been selected to receive the 2016 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award from the 3M Corporation. This highly competitive award, administered by 3M's Research and Development Community in partnership with 3Mgives, encourages the pursuit of new ideas among non-tenured university professors, giving them the opportunity to interact with their peers and 3M scientists. Beese received the award for her proposal “Mechanics of Materials Made by Additive Manufacturing.”
In its 26th year, the award recognizes “outstanding new faculty who were selected based on their research, experience, and academic leadership.” The award was created to support new faculty in their path to tenure. Recipients are nominated by 3M researchers. In addition to the honor, the award provides Beese $15,000 per year to support her research. The funding will continue until tenure is achieved, up to a maximum of three years.
“I am honored to be selected for the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award,” said Beese. “It will help greatly enhance my research program as a young investigator. This award will provide crucial financial support early in my career. With this award, my group and I will be able to address novel research questions in materials science and engineering, which is difficult without independent funding.”
Beese, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering in EMS’ Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MatSE), joined the Penn State faculty in 2013. Her research focuses on determining the relationships between the microstructure in a material and its macroscopic plasticity and fracture behavior, using both experimental investigation and computational modeling. One of her research programs specifically examines the processing-property-mechanical property relationships in additively manufactured metallic components, including titanium, steel, and nickel alloys, as well as functionally graded materials. Another research thrust focuses on uncovering the mechanisms of ductile failure of metals over a wide range of stress states toward the development of predictive computational fracture models.
Beese earned a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering and a minor in engineering mechanics from Penn State in 2005. After graduating, she spent a year working at Lockheed Martin’s Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in upstate New York. Beese earned her master of science in 2008 and her doctorate in 2011, both in mechanical engineering with a minor in biomechanics from MIT. At MIT, she performed research in Professor Tomasz Wierzbicki’s Impact and Crashworthiness Laboratory, studying deformation induced phase transformation in austenitic steels and was awarded a three-year Department of Defense National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Before joining Penn State’s faculty, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Horacio Espinosa’s Micro and Nanomechanics Laboratory at Northwestern University.
Beese has been the recipient of numerous other young faculty awards. She received the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Award in 2015 from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). ORAU’s competitive research grants are awarded to junior faculty to enrich the research and professional growth of young faculty. She also received a 2015 Young Leader Professional Development Award from the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS). TMS awards recognize early-career individuals, under the age of 40, for their potential as future leaders within TMS and the materials and engineering community it serves.
Additionally, she was awarded the Norris B. McFarlane Faculty Career Development Professorship. The professorship is part of a $1 million commitment from the estate of Cathleen McFarlane-Ross, longtime friend of Penn State. McFarlane-Ross's gift honors her late husband, industrialist Norris “Mac” McFarlane, who graduated from Penn State in 1934 with a bachelor of science degree in metallurgy.