Conférenciers invités

Petr Haušild graduated in Physical Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague in 1998 and got his Ph.D. in Mechanics of Materials at Ecole Centrale Paris in 2002. In 2002, he joined the Department of Materials, Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague, rising through the ranks from assistant to full professor (in 2018).
His main research interests are mechanics of materials and materials characterization with focus on fracture micromechanisms (fractography) and local mechanical properties (especially using indentation techniques and/or miniature-sized specimens).
He worked mostly on development of iron-based intermetallic alloys, fracture and damage of steels for nuclear reactors, martensitic transformation of metastable austenitic stainless steels and TiNi shape memory alloys. Recently he works e.g. on statistical treatment of indentation data, icephobization of polymers by surface morphology and properties of high entropy alloys.

Assoc. Prof. RNDr. František Lofaj, DrSc. is a Senior researcher working in the field of structural ceramics and hard coatings at the Division of ceramic and non metallic materials at the Institute of Materials Research of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. His activities in 1990-2007 involved the relationships between microstructure and mechanical properties of advanced ceramics materials, especially creep in silicon nitride. Since 2007, his main interests involve hard PVD coatings, including the relationships between the deposition condition, structure, composition and their resulting mechanical and tribological properties. He also stayed for several years at the leading research institutions in Japan (JFCC), USA (NIST, CUA), Germany(KIT) and in The Netherlands (JRC EC). F. Lofaj is an author and co-author of more than 160 publications, including 104 in the Scopus database, 4 patents and his works accummulated more than 730 citations (h = 14).

Benoit Merle has been leading the nanomechanics group at the University of Erlangen Nuremberg since 2013. He has a strong research focus on the mechanical characterization of materials in small dimensions by nanoindentation, micromechanical testing and in situ testing in the SEM and AFM. He is an expert at developing novel testing methods and also has a strong background in the fabrication and characterization of thin films and coatings. His current interests are connected to small-scale fatigue, nanotribology and nanoindentation at high strain rates. This last topic was initiated during a research stay with Prof. George Pharr at Texas A&M university in 2018.

Dr.-Ing. habil. Malgorzata Kopycinska-Müller studied Physics at the University of Gdansk, Poland. In 2000 she started a position of a PhD student at Fraunhofer Institute for Nondestructive Testing, IZFP in Saarbrücken. Her topic was the application of an atomic force microscopy to determine mechanical properties of nanoscale materials. In Saarbrücken she learned the principle and helped to further develop the atomic force acoustic microscopy (AFAM) mode of AFM. In 2003, Dr. Kopycinska-Müller moved to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder Colorado, where she completed her PhD and Post-Doc position. After a short maternity leave in 2006, she continued her work in the field of nanoscale contact mechanics in Dresden, first at TU-Dresden in the Institute of Electronic Packaging Technology and then at Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS. In 2017 Dr. Kopycinska-Müller completed her habilitation in the field of mechanical characterization of nano-thin films for electronic industry. Currently she is a leader of the group Characterization Methods at IKTS, Dresden.