Paul A. Lagace is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, where he also received his SB, SM and PhD. He is a highly regarded international authority on the response and failure of composite structures and is recognized as a leader for the development of composite structures technology, particularly as related to the safety of aircraft structural systems.

He has more recently pursued work related to broader systems issues, particularly dealing with the use of technology and associated risk. He has frequently served as an advisor and consultant to industry and government agencies on aspects of structural technology and broader engineering systems. He has served as a consultant, expert witness and member of committees and panels in the investigation of accidents and their implications.

He is a member of several societies and national committees, a fellow of the AIAA, the ASC and the ASTM, and has served for a number of years as president of the ICCM (International Committee on Composite Materials), being recognized as a World Fellow of Composites and honorary member of the Executive Council. He is very interested in teaching and advising and has won several teaching awards, including being recognized as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow.

Caroline Ross has been a professor at MIT in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering since 1997. Prior to that, she spent six years working in research and development at Komag, an independent supplier of computer hard disks. This work was preceded by two years of research as a postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

She has a bachelor’s degree and a PhD from Cambridge University in England, has published about 200 papers and 10 patents, and is a member of the Materials Research Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the American Physical Society, and the Electrochemical Society. She is a fellow of the APS, the MRS and the UK Institute of Physics, and Chair of the 2011 Magnetism and Magnetic Materials Conference.

Gregory C. Rutledge is the Lammot du Pont Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. He holds a BS from the University of Virginia and PhD from MIT, both in chemical engineering.

Before obtaining his PhD, Rutledge worked for the Dow Chemical Company. He subsequently held postdoctoral appointments at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and at the University of Leeds, England. Since joining the faculty at MIT, he has served as director of the Program in Polymer Science and Technology and as executive officer in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

Rutledge’s research is in the area of molecular engineering of soft matter — in particular the development of process-structure-property relationships for engineered polymers — through the use of molecular simulation and experiment. Since 2001, he and his co-workers have published extensively on the fabrication, properties and applications of polymeric nanofibers and nonwoven membranes formed by the process of electrospinning.

He has authored or co-authored more than 200 book chapters and papers in refereed journals or archival conference proceedings, given 150 invited lectures, and applied for or been issued eight patents. He is an associate editor or editorial board member for Macromolecules, Polymer and the Journal of Engineering Fibers and Fabrics. He is a 1994 recipient of the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award and the 2000 H. A. Morton Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Polymer Science at the University of Akron, and he has been a fellow of the American Physical Society since 2005.

Yang Shao-Horn is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering. She works with graduate students and postdocs on materials for electrochemical energy storage and conversion, which is centered on understanding and altering the crystal, surface and electronic structures of thin films and nanomaterials, and applying fundamental understanding to design new materials for lithium storage and electrocatalysis of small molecules such as oxygen reduction, water splitting and methanol oxidation.

She obtained her PhD in metallurgical and materials engineering from Michigan Technological University in 1998. She then worked as a staff scientist at Eveready Battery Company until 2000. She joined MIT in August 2002 after a two-year NSF International Research Fellowship at the Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry in Bordeaux, France.

Her select honors include Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award of the Electrochemical Society 2008; Dupont Young Faculty Award 2006; MIT Presidential Energy Research Council 2005; Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award 2003.

Edwin Thomas and his students carry out research on photonics, phononics, interference lithography and mechanical behavior of microtrusses, polymer physics and engineering of the mechanical and optical properties of block copolymers, liquid crystalline polymers and hybrid organic-inorganic nanocomposites.

One area of special interest is photonics and the fabrication of polymeric photonic crystals using self-assembly, especially with block copolymers, and holographic interference lithography. For these studies, large emphasis is placed on the understanding of complex relations between the lattice symmetry and optical properties of periodic structures. Another area of particular focus is phononics. Just as periodic variation in refractive index opens gaps in photonic band structure of a medium, periodic variation in density and sound velocities may create band gaps for mechanical waves. His group is exploring the way light and sound propagate in quasicrystalline photonic and phononic structures. This opens the possibility to control properties and propagation of light and sound in dual band gap structures.

Other major topics in his research are structured polymers. His structured materials research concentrates on enhancing our ability to fabricate complex structures with characteristic length in submicron and nanometer range in order to create materials with superior properties that can be tailored to a particular application. Understanding the influence of composition and processing conditions on the resultant microstructure of polymers and how this determines the properties is the central part of his polymer morphology research.