Materials Engineering and Processing

Elliot Biro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering. He has an extensive background in joining techniques used in the automotive and steel industries from his work with ArcelorMittal Global Research where he was responsible for many projects that applied metallurgical fundamentals to solve industrial problems. Dr. Biro’s experience includes process optimization for a variety of welding techniques (gas metal arc welding, spot welding, laser welding, high frequency induction welding, flash butt welding, and seam welding), understanding property changes and cracking during welding (heat affected zone softening and LME cracking), and development of simulation techniques to understand the metallurgical changes during welding and other steel manufacturing processes. 

Dr. Biro’s primary research interests are: metallurgical changes during welding, development of defects during welding, increasing process robustness to improve manufacturability, physical simulation of the welding process, welding of advanced high strength steels (AHSS), dissimilar material joining and weld evaluation. He currently sits on a variety of industry committees with the AWS and the CCIIW. From his work with industry Dr. Biro was responsible for $25M in savings to manufacturing costs from the results his projects. He has been awarded over $1M in grants and currently has over 50 journal papers and 30 conference papers. 

Adrian Gerlich is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering and part of the Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research at the university. He is affiliated with the Canadian Welding Association, American Welding Society, and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Canada. 

Professor Gerlich’s research interests are in the physical metallurgy of welded components, friction stir welding and processing, roll bonding, overlay welding, and material characterization of light alloys, steels, and metal matrix composites using quantitative electron microscopy. 

His current efforts focus mainly on welding metallurgy of high strength steels, and dissimilar metal joining for transportation applications. To-date he has published over 60 journal papers, and 25 conference papers. 

Charles Chi-Fong Kwan is a researcher and educator that specializes in Material Science and Engineering. Specifically, his expertise lies in in the process-structure property relationships if materials and the related materials characterization technique. 

Michael Mayer is an Associate Professor in the department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. From 2000 to 2004 he was a senior R&D engineer with a semiconductor equipment manufacturer, ESEC, in Switzerland. He received a diploma (masters) degree in Physics in 1994 and a PhD degree in Technical Sciences in 2000, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. 
 
Michael has prior experience as a senior process engineer, project leader, and intellectual property responsible. Since joining the University of Waterloo, Michael has conducted projects with several companies including Microbonds Inc., MK Electron, Bosch, Oerlikon, Intel Corp., Kulicke and Soffa, Orthodyne Electronics, Futurewei, Microfab AG, Montfort Lasers, and others. Michael is serving on the executive committee of the IEEE Electronics Components and Technology Conference. 
 
Michael has co-authored many technical publications and patents. He has developed improved bonding methods and various microsensor tools for diagnostics of processes and reliability of microjoints and more recently has been working on direct bonding and laser joining of biological materials. publications on incompressible flow turbomachinery, pump internal velocity measurements, fan design, and performance measurement, and experimental and numerical studies of turbulent recirculating flows.  

Individually, he has lectured and has authored many publications on measurement techniques for wind turbine aerodynamics, the performance of turbine airfoils, as well as developed innovative aeroacoustic measurement techniques for wind turbines.  

Dr. Musselman joined the University of Waterloo in 2015, where his research focuses on the development of functional nanomaterials for a variety of devices, including photovoltaic solar cells, light emitting diodes, memristors, quantum-tunnelling diodes, and novel sensors. He is interested in developing scalable methods for manufacturing nanomaterials, including spatial atomic layer deposition and pulsed laser approaches. 
 
Dr. Musselman performed his doctoral studies in the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge with Prof. Judith Driscoll. Dr. Musselman developed new electrochemical methods for fabricating cuprous oxide (Cu2O) and zinc oxide (ZnO) nanomaterials, as well as Cu2O-ZnO solar cells. In 2010 Dr. Musselman was appointed the Hertha Ayrton Junior Research Fellow in Science at Girton College, Cambridge University. He performed his research in the Department of Physics with Sir Richard Friend. Dr. Musselman helped pioneer the use of atmospheric pressure spatial atomic layer deposition (AP-SALD) thin films in optoelectronic devices. He produced thin films of metal oxide alloys with tunable optoelectronic properties with which he probed loss mechanisms in colloidal quantum dot solar cells, ‘hybrid’ polymer-oxide solar cells and light emitting diodes, and all-oxide solar cells. These metal oxide films were also used to produce new, colour-pure “hybrid” organometal halide perovskite light-emitting diodes. 

Dr. Peng received the BASc and MASc degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from the China University of Geosciences at Beijing in 2007 and 2010, respectively, and the PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering and Nanotechnology from the University of Waterloo in 2014. From 2014 to 2015, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Advanced Materials Joining at the University of Waterloo. He then took an associate professor position in the Mechanical Engineering department at the Beihang University, China. In 2021, he moved back to the MME at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Peng’s research activities and interests are in the general area of materials science and processing technologies for micro/nano electronics, medical and aerospace applications, specialized in micro/nano-joining, laser processing, and brazing. 

Mary Wells is Dean of Engineering at the University of Waterloo (July 1, 2020 - ), the ninth dean since the Faculty was founded in 1957. From 2017-2020, she was Dean of the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Guelph. 
 
Prior to her time in Guelph, Wells was a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo for 10 years. She received awards for graduate supervision from both the Faculty and the University in 2017. 
 
An accomplished materials engineer, Wells also served as the Associate Dean of Outreach for Waterloo Engineering between 2008 and 2017 and chaired its Women in Engineering committee for many years. She chaired the Ontario Network of Women in Engineering from 2013 to 2018. 
 
Wells began her academic career as a professor in materials engineering at the University of British Columbia from 1996 to 2007 and has worked in the steel industry in Canada and internationally. 
 
The co-author of two books including one on Canadian women innovators and the second on Canadian women in materials, her research focuses on the relationship between processing, structure and properties for advanced metallic alloys used in the transportation sector. 

Professor Yimin Wu is the inaugural Tang Family Chair in New Energy Materials and Sustainability. Professor Wu’s research focuses on the design of new energy materials for solar fuels and batteries, and novel electronic, photonic, responsive materials for flexible electronics and soft robotics, and energy efficient neuromorphic computing through a deep understanding of energy transduction processes at interfaces. Wu is the director of the Materials Interfaces Foundry (MIF) at the University of Waterloo and serves on the board of directors in Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology. Wu also serves on the editorial board of Energy and Environmental Materials. Wu has authored and co-authored more than 90 peer-reviewed journal papers, which includes Nature, Nature Energy (x 2), Nature communications (x 2). Wu is also listed as an inventor on 7 US/international patents. Wu has delivered over 30 invited lectures across the world in last 5 years. 

Dr. Yavuz is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering with cross-appointments to Electrical and Computer Engineering and Systems Design Engineering. Dr. Yavuz is the Director of the Nano- and Micro- Systems Lab at the Waterloo Institute of Nanotechnology (WIN) and Director of Collaborative Graduate Nanotechnology Program. 
 
Dr. Yavuz’s research area is micro and nanoscale materials and device design, fabrication, functionalization and characterization, in four key applications areas: a. high-temperature-superconductor (HTSC) accelerators for “driven subcritical fission” superconducting magnets (thorium-recycle nuclear reactors); b. HTSC-Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) for bio-sensing and Qubits for quantum information storage; c. Nano- and micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems (O-N/MEMS) devices for sensing, actuation and energy harvesting, and d. O-N/MEMS packaging, and reliability. 

Norman Zhou is a Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Advanced Materials Joining and Processing in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering and also cross-appointed into the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He is a member of the Waterloo Institute of Technology, the Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology and Water Institute, at the University of Waterloo. 

Professor Zhou is the Associate Director of the Centre for Advanced Materials Joining (CAMJ) at the University of Waterloo. CAMJ aims to develop innovative technologies for materials joining and processing, including micro- and nano-joining. CAMJ collaborates with leading companies in the industry for research and development, and also trains and works with students. 

Professor Zhou’s expertise lies in the areas of advanced welding and joining technologies, nanomaterials fabrication in applications such as nanosensing and water treatment, and laser processing of shape memory alloys. His research has applications in several areas such as microelectronics, medical and health-related, and automotive industries. He is a fellow of CAE, AWS and ASM. 

Professor Zhou has authored and co-authored over 400 refereed journal papers and several books, including “Microjoining and Nanojoining” and “Joining and Assembly of Medical Materials and Devices”. Professor Zhou is a co-founder of SmarterAlloys.com. He has trained over 50 MASc and 30 PhD graduates, and 60 PDFs/visiting scholars since 2000. 

Michael Benoit is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo focusing on materials. In addition to being part of the Materials Processing Engineering group, he is also part of Waterloo’s Multi-Scale Additive Manufacturing Lab.