Maarten de Jong

Maarten de Jong is a PhD- student at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and he graduated in the Noval Aerospace Materials Group in 2010.

“During my Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, in fact I became primarily interested in aerodynamics, numerical math and finite-element methods. Even though I found (and still find) these topics highly interesting, I personally felt like it's rather difficult to make novel and innovative contributions and advance the field. Hence, I started looking for challenging fields that are somewhat less matured and in which lots of breakthroughs have been made recently and will be made soon, I believe. I did lots of literature research to look for suitable research areas and this led me to the Novel Materials group of professor Sybrand van der Zwaag. In his group, I specialized in computational materials science, simply because I've always had a great interest in the combination of math, physics and programming.
For people who would like to work in a company as an engineer, I think ASM offers good perspectives too. There's tons of jobs related to structural design and optimization and materials science around and at ASM this is precisely what you'll learn about. I would recommend looking for a specialization that you both find interesting and in which the job perspectives look good. 

During my MSc, I very much enjoyed the freedom of taking classes that were interesting to me. For example, I had interests in some non-aerospace topics such as quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, so I simply decided to bike over to the physics department a few times a week to take those classes.  Above all, I enjoyed doing my research. I had a team of great research supervisors during my MSc, namely Prof. Sybrand van der Zwaag, Dr. Pedro Rivera and Dr. Marcel Sluiter (ME). They allowed me to achieve my maximum potential in my research project, which dealt with studying precipitation in aluminum alloys, as commonly employed in the aerospace industry. For my MSc research, I was awarded both the Tata Steel Prize (best graduate work in the field of mechanical and materials engineering in The Netherlands in 2010) and the NvvL Dutch Aerospace Society Award (best graduate work in the field of aerospace engineering in The Netherlands in 2010). This was of course a great recognition of my work and probably one of the best moments during my MSc.

Also during my MSc, I was awarded a 22,000 euro Huygens Talent Fellowship, which provided me with full funding to attend the University of California at Berkeley in the USA for a After my initial year of doing research and enjoying the sunny weather at UC Berkeley, I was offered a fellowship by the United States Naval Research Office, which allowed me to continue my work as a graduate student researcher at UC Berkeley, working in the group of Prof. Mark Asta. My research deals with understanding the detailed atomistic mechanisms that contribute to ductility in metals and alloys. I compute for example twin boundary energies, dislocation energies and elastic constants, which can be used in models to estimate ductility. My other branch of research concerns high-throughput calculations. We employ supercomputers at various US national labs (Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Oak Ridge National Lab, Argonne National Lab) to compute various materials properties from quantum mechanics. In December 2015 I was awarded the Gareth Thomas Materials Excellence Award for my research, awarded to the top graduate student in the department of Materials Science at UC Berkeley. 

For those students who are interested in pursuing an academic or research career, I think ASM is a great choice to learn to do independent research and document it in an MSc thesis. Make sure to do literature reviews and identify topics that are not only interesting to you but also part of emerging fields, and in which you feel like you could make contributions. Talk to as many professors as possible and ask them for their opinions: they've been in the business for much longer than you have and they probably have a much better overview where things are going. Also, if you get the chance, try to go abroad for a while during your MSc.

For people who would like to work in a company as an engineer, I think ASM offers good perspectives too. There's tons of jobs related to structural design and optimization and materials science around and at ASM this is precisely what you'll learn about. I would recommend looking for a specialization that you both find interesting and in which the job perspectives look good.