HIGHL IGHTS A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 3 4 2 2023 ASM Student Paper Contest Winner receives a $500 cash prize and up to $500 toward expenses to attend IMAT. Deadline April 1. Qualifications: • Entrant must be a Material Advantage member in good standing and enrolled as a student at a school or university offering courses in the field of materials science or engineering. • All entries must be submitted to ASM Headquarters no later than April 1. All entrants will be advised of the status of their submission (including the author selected to receive the award) by July 1 of the year preceding presentation of the award. ASM is seeking nominations for the 2023 and 2024 contest. • For multi-author papers, the student must be the first author. • At the time of submission, the paper must be published or accepted for publication in an ASM-owned or co-owned journal (such as Metallurgical and Materials Transactions). • Visit the ASM website at http://www.asminternational. org/membership/awards/nominate for complete sample form, rules, and past recipients. FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK Lobbying with our Collective Materials Voice ASM International is the largest society for professional materials engineers and one of our key strategic initiatives is to build on the “international” part of our name. A prime example of our international outreach is our partnership with IOM3 in the U.K. I’ve been a member of IOM3 for as long as I’ve been an ASM member, and I now pay my dues to IOM3 via ASM. Even as we seek to broaden our influence around the materials world, there are also roles we can play to increase our impact here in the U.S. About this time last year, ASM President Judith Todd led a response from ASM to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine furthering the vision of the Materials Genome Initiative. More recently, at IMAT we held an open session for leaders of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA), which is seeking input from across the nation to determine the direction of future funding strategies for NSF’s Engineering Directorate. Just this past week, we synthesized the input from leaders of our affiliate societies, councils, and board to answer specific questions raised by ERVA. It is essential that we seek every opportunity to increase our influence in the U.S. outside of our own membership. And most importantly, we need to have our voice heard in Washington—not just at the funding agencies and professional societies, but on Capitol Hill—because that’s where policies are made. Whenever we respond to a government funding opportunity, we are responding to someone else’s policy decision. It’s obviously better to help build the policy itself rather than simply react to someone else’s idea. As we look to ASM’s future roles, it’s worth remembering that 20 or more years ago, there was an active group in D.C. called the Federationof Materials Societies (FMS), which lobbied on the Hill on behalf of materials societies, materials industries, and materials research. FMS has not been active for many years, which is a big loss for us and other materials organizations. I believe that one way to grow our leadership and influence in the U.S. is to work with the other materials professional societies to combine our efforts to influence the policy makers in Washington. While we in the U.S. have let such an organization flounder, our colleagues in Europe have an active Federation of European Materials Societies, a not-for-profit association of societies and associations covering science and engineering in various fields including metals, polymers, ceramics, composites, glasses, nanomaterials, and biomaterials in 22 different countries. This is a model we should seek to emulate. There is power and influence in such federations, but currently the U.S. materials industries and materials researchers and educators have no such combined power to lobby our Congress. We might not like how the legislative and budgetary sausage is made in D.C. However, if we aren’t in the kitchen watching it being made and pressing for our contributions to the recipe, then we can’t complain when the nation doesn’t see materials as the truly strategic and enabling discipline that they are. Materials are essential for our economic development, our industrial future, and our defense. We owe it to our members to keep sending this message to the federal government. ASM President David B. Williams, FASM david.williams@asminternational.org Williams FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK
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