Professor Simon Ringer Wins Materials Australia Silver Medal

Source: Sally Wood

Materials Australia is pleased to announce that Professor Simon Ringer has been awarded the institute’s prestigious Silver Medal. Professor Ringer received the award for his outstanding contribution to the advancement of materials science and engineering through research scholarship in microstructure-propertyprocessing relationships, research leadership in establishing worldclass infrastructure for materials research, and service in the promotion and dissemination of materials issues to the wider community.

Professor Simon Ringer’s achievements as a materials scientist and engineer have opened new relationships between the microstructure, properties and processing of advanced materials. The achievements are both outstanding and comprehensive, spanning both fundamental scientific breakthroughs and technological advances in partnership with industry. They span structural materials such as steels, and the light metals, through to functional materials such as semiconductors and magnetic materials. Collectively, Professor Ringer’s research, from the atomic-scale, has opened new pathways for the development of stronger, lighter structural alloys and functional nanomaterials that have economic and environmental advantages. His leadership has forged a world-class research infrastructure for Australia’s materials community, and this now underpins a nationally significant scientific and industrial research and development capacity. His generous service has contributed significantly to the strong standing of the Australian materials research and development community.

Professor Ringer was awarded a Bachelor of Applied Science (Metallurgy) from the University of South Australia in 1986, and a PhD from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 1991. He has held academic roles in Sweden and Japan, worked at a start-up in the USA, and held academic positions at Monash University, UNSW and the University of Sydney. A materials engineer, he specialises in the relationships between the microstructure of materials and their engineering performance. Professor Ringer’s research is themed around structural, electronic and magnetic properties of materials. He is an expert in electron microscopy, atom probe microscopy and first principles ab-initio materials simulations. His research scholarship has led to key advances in the structural property relationships of materials, some of which is patented. He has published over 300 papers that have been cited over 12,500 times with a h-index of 62. He is listed as one of the world’s top researchers, across all fields of research, in the 2019 analysis by Ioannidis et al. on the quality and quantity of research publications. Contributing significant leadership and service to his communities, Professor Ringer was the foundational executive director of the Australian Microscopy and Microanalysis Research Facility (now

Microscopy Australia) and a founding director of Sydney Nano. He also served as the Director of the Australian Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis at the University of Sydney from 2001-2014. Professor Ringer is presently responsible for research infrastructure strategy and operations at the University of Sydney, where he serves as the Academic Director of the Core Research Facilities. His service roles include his work as Chair of the 19th International Microscopy Congress, held in Sydney in September 2018. Professor Ringer has been a member of Materials Australia since 1985, and is a CMatP and Fellow of IEAust.

The Silver Medal is awarded for outstanding contributions to the advancement of metallurgy, metallurgical engineering, materials science or materials engineering through management, teaching, innovation, development or research. The Medal was last awarded in 2009 to Emeritus Professor David StJohn. Professor Ringer joins an especially prestigious group of recipients of the Silver Medal, who have all contributed so significantly to the last 63 years of Australian Materials Science and Engineering.