Tony Rollett has been named as the US Steel Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. This professorship recognizes his ground breaking research in the areas of Metallurgy and Computational Materials Science. Rollett came to Carnegie Mellon in 1996 and took the position of Head of the Materials Science and Engineering Department. At that time, he had already established an international reputation in the area of texture studies and the modeling of grain growth. About eight years after coming to Carnegie Mellon, he laid the groundwork for a computational scheme that creates three-dimensional models of polycrystalline microstructures that are statistically equivalent to observed microstructures. Until that time, nearly all microstructural models were limited to two dimensions, mainly because of the limits of computer memory and computational speed. Rollett realized that three-dimensional modeling was required to accurately describe a microstructure and that it would soon be possible to easily implement such models on computers with rapidly expanding capabilities.

Over the last few years, Rollett has been focusing his efforts on additive manufacturing, or more precisely, modeling and understanding the microstructures that are formed during the additive manufacturing of metallic parts. As part of this work, he has been instrumental in the launching of the Next Manufacturing Center with Jack Beuth. 

Rollett’s achievements have been recognized by a range of elected leadership positions and awards. For example, He is a fellow of the American Society for Metals (ASM), The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), and the Institute of Physics (UK). He was selected as a Member of Honor of the French Metallurgical Society, given the Henry Marion Howe Medal by ASM and the Cyril Stanley Smith Award by TMS. He was elected Chair of the Gordon Conference for Physical Metallurgy in 2015, the Chair of the Organizing Committee for the 15th International Conference on the Textures of Materials in 2008, Co-Organizer of the 13th International Conference on Aluminum and its Alloys in 2012, and Chair of the International Committee for the Conference series on Recrystallization and Grain Growth held in Australia in 2013. He also organizes an annual meeting on three-dimensional materials science that is attended by researchers from around the world seeking to apply the techniques developed in Rollett’s research.