Hillert-Cahn Award

Hillert-Cahn Lecturer 2015: Peter Voorhees



Peter Voorhees is the Frank C. Engelhart Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, and Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics. He is co-director of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering and is co-director of the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  He was a member of the Metallurgy Division at the National Institute for Standards and Technology until joining the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University in 1988. He has received numerous awards including the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, ASM International Materials Science Division Research Award (Silver Medal), the TMS Bruce Chalmers Award, the ASM J. Willard Gibbs Phase Equilibria Award, the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science Award for Teaching Excellence, and is listed as a Highly Cited Researcher by the Institute for Scientific Information. Professor Voorhees is a fellow of ASM International, the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, and the American Physical Society. He has published over 200 papers in the area of the thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transformations

Mats Hillert and John Cahn:

The Hillert-Cahn lectureship was instituted in 2010 in recognition of the outstanding contributions of John Cahn and Mats Hillert to the science of phase transformations in solid materials.  It is awarded to a leading practitioner of the discipline at each PTM conference on recommendation of the organizing committee, and in consultation with John Cahn, Mats Hillert and former recipients.

Comment on the contributions of Mats Hillert and John Cahn:

Mats Hillert and John Cahn first made their presence widely felt in the 1950's with seminal publications: a wide-ranging contribution on the effects of interface curvature on phase transformations by Mats [1]; and a series of highly original papers by John with John Hilliard on the free energy of non-uniform solutions [2,3,4].  These and their many subsequent contributions played a major role in shaping the discipline.  They  each possess great breadth of interest and depth of insight; in addition to hosts of other honors, each has had a volume published of his selected works [5,6].  Without the contributions of Mats Hillert and John Cahn, the science of phase transformations would be a quite different and significantly diminished discipline.

  1. Mats Hillert, Jernkont. Ann., vol. 141, 1957, p. 11.
  2. J. W. Cahn, J. E. Hilliard, J. Chem. Phys.,  vol. 28, 1958, p. 258.
  3. J. W. Cahn, J. Chem. Phys., vol. 30, 1959, p. 1121.   
  4. J. W. Cahn, J. E. Hilliard, J. Chem. Phys., vol. 31, 1959, p. 688.
  5. "The selected works of John. W. Cahn", eds. W. Craig Carter, William C. Johnson, TMS, Warrendale, PA, 1998.
  6. "Thermodynamics and phase transformations: the selected works of Mats Hillert", eds. John     Ågren, Yves Bréchet, Christopher Hutchinson, Jean Philibert, Gary Purdy, EDP publishers, France.     2006. 

Previous Recipients:

2010 – Gary R. Purdy, McMaster University Canada