Education
- PhD, Purdue University, 2010
- MS, Purdue University, 2006
- BS, Virginia Tech, 2004
Research Areas and Descriptors
Background
Dr. Christopher Saldana began working at Georgia Tech in the Fall of 2014. Prior, Dr. Saldana was an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University and held the Harold and Inge Marcus Career Professorship. Dr. Saldana has also previously held visiting researcher positions with the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, India) and Sandia National Laboratories.
Research
Dr. Saldana's current research interests are centered on establishing the processing science needed to realize next generation material systems (alloys, composites, bio-inspired) and manufacturing processes. Toward this objective, Dr. Saldana's research group seeks to develop frameworks for describing relationships between process parameters, thermomechanical variables, evolving material structure and microstructure, and overall process/material performance. For example, Dr. Saldana's group has developed novel experimental platforms to elucidate process-structure-performance envelopes for ultrafine-grained, nanocrystalline, and nanotwinned bulk materials and surfaces of interest to the structural materials community. Outcomes of these studies are now being used to guide development of scalable methods for micro-scale surface texturing and surface microstructure control with application in high performance automotive, aerospace and biomedical systems. In these studies, Dr. Saldana's group brings to fore multi-scale materials characterization tools (e.g., SEM/TEM, EBSD, XRD, CT, nanoindentation), process measurement methods (e.g., high speed DIC, IR) and analytical models. Dr. Saldana's research has previously been supported by various government agencies (NSF, DARPA, NIST, DOE, ARO) and large/small business (Volvo, Applied Process, Third Wave Systems, Manufacturing Labs Inc, M4 Sciences), among others.