MSE Seminar: Kelly Nygren (Cornell CHESS)

Bio: Kelly Nygren is the lead staff scientist at the Structural Materials Beamline at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), combining her passion for understanding the performance of current and next-generation engineering alloys with applied problems. SMB is part of the Materials Solutions Network at CHESS, an Air Force Research Laboratory funded subfacility dedicated to targeting the most urgent and promising opportunities facing the Department of Defense and their Original Equipment Manufacturers. Kelly earned her B.S. in 2011 and Ph.D. in 2016 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in materials science and engineering. In her graduate work, advanced electron microscopy tools across length scales were used to illuminate deformation and fracture pathways of engineering alloys in extreme environments. Her postdoc at the University of Wisconsin Madison extended these studies into corrosion and radiation degradation of alloys. Challenged with how to interface mechanistic understandings from electron microscopy with macroscopic models, she joined the Cornell community as a CHESS postdoc seeking to bridge these length scales with synchrotron X-ray diffraction. In her current role, she continues to combine these complementary modalities to target fundamental mechanisms of deformation in polycrystalline alloys, especially under fatigue and extreme conditions.