Christopher A. Schuh is the Danae and Vasilis Salapatas Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.Schuh’s academic training in Materials Science and Engineering focused on metals, including their processing, microstructure, and mechanics. He earned his B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997, and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2001. He held the Ernest O. Lawrence postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 2001-2002, prior to joining the MIT faculty in 2002.

Prof. Schuh’s research is focused on structural metallurgy and seeks to control disorder in metallic microstructures for the purpose of optimizing mechanical properties; much of his work is on the design and control of grain boundary structure and chemistry. Prof. Schuh has published more than 250 papers and dozens of patents, and has received a variety of awards acknowledging his research accomplishments.

Prof. Schuh has co-founded a number of metallurgical companies. His first MIT spin-out company, Xtalic Corporation, commercialized a process from Schuh’s MIT laboratory to control the internal structure in metal electroplated coatings down to the nanometer scale, producing exceptional mechanical and functional properties. These nanocrystalline coatings have been deployed in applications ranging from machine components, to automotive parts, to electronics, and are in wide and growing usage around the globe. Prof. Schuh also cofounded Desktop Metal, a metal additive manufacturing company producing 3D metal printers that address markets ranging from prototyping, to shop-scale, to production scale.

In 2011 Prof. Schuh was appointed Head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, a position he filled until the end of 2019. During his tenure as Head the department saw a significant expansion of the faculty ranks, a major reconfiguration of their physical spaces at the heart of the MIT campus, and the roll-out of online materials science courses that have expanded the exposure of MIT’s Materials Science and Engineering program to learners from all over the globe. He also currently serves as the Coordinating Editor of the Acta Materialia family of journals, including Acta Materialia, Scripta Materialia, Acta Biomaterialia, and Materialia, the last of which he launched in 2018. Among his various awards and honors are his appointment as a MacVicar Fellow of MIT, acknowledging his contributions to engineering education, and his election as member of the National Academy of Inventors and the National Academy of Engineering.