The second annual Robert C. Cammarata Memorial Lecture will occur on Wednesday, January 21st, 2026. The lecture will occur in the Bloomberg Student Center (BSC) theater, room 105, at 3pm and the following reception will take place in the BSC room 404.
This year’s speaker is A. Lindsay Greer from the University of Cambridge Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy.
Abstract: Extending the range of the glassy state
The energy of a glassy composition at a given temperature depends on its processing history, as demonstrated by studies of oxides and polymers. Metallic glasses particularly facilitate exploration of the extent of the energy range: high-energy states of interest for improved mechanical properties, and low-energy states that perhaps transcend the famed Kauzmann paradox (liquid/glass with entropy lower than that of the corresponding crystalline state). Thermomechanical processing is commonly used to optimize properties in crystalline metallic alloys. For their glassy counterparts, processing effects are found even in the nominally elastic regime (static loading and cryogenic thermal cycling). The state of a glass is characteristic of the cooling rate at which it was formed. We show that the achievable energy range in metallic glasses is vast, approaching the melting temperature, and corresponds to an effective cooling rate spanning more than 20 orders of magnitude. Useful properties emerge, meeting some longstanding grand challenges, such as how to introduce the capacity for work-hardening into glasses.
Bio:
Prof. A. Lindsay Greer
Emeritus Professor of Materials Science
Director of Research Relations (Physical Sciences and Technology)
University of Cambridge, Cambridge UK.
Lindsay Greer received his MA and PhD degrees from Cambridge, and holds Honorary Doctorates from AGH University of Science & Technology, Kraków, Poland, and University ‘St Kliment Ohridski’, Sofia, Bulgaria. As Assistant Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University, he was Bob Cammarata’s advisor. Greer has held visiting positions at the INP Grenoble, Washington University (St Louis), and the Universities of Vienna and Turin. He is a Foreign PI of the Advanced Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan). At Cambridge, he served as Head of the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy (2006‒2013) and Head of the School of the Physical Sciences, i.e., dean for eight departments (2016‒2019). Greer’s research interests are mainly in metallic glasses and crystal nucleation. He has published some 500 scientific papers, and is the author (with KF Kelton) of Nucleation in Condensed Matter: Applications in Materials and Biology (2010). His H-index is 76 (WoS, 7 Dec. 2025).