Meet CMI postdoc Kate Elder

image of two people standing by a banner: CMI Director Tom Lograsso and CMI postdoc Kate Elder, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
(Left) CMI Director Tom Lograsso and (right) CMI postdoc Kate Elder, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Kate Elder is a CMI postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, since August 2021. During the CMI Meeting at Mines in April 2024, Elder presented “Thermodynamic Investigation of Rare-Earth Reduced Magnet Systems,” and earned a best poster award.

Elder was awarded a Fulbright Award to pursue advanced studies at VTT, Technical Research Centre at Helsinki, Finland. She will work with the Computational Materials Design team to investigate microstructures that form during additive manufacturing of high entropy alloys (link: https://www.llnl.gov/article/51091/llnls-kate-elder-honored-fulbright-foreign-scholarship).

Additionally, Elder recently was first author on publications on high entropy alloy design in npj Computational Materials. Elder earned a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) PhD Scholarship.

Elder is developing an integrated computational materials engineering framework to identify manufacturing conditions that optimize ductility and strength in additively manufactured materials important to future applications using critical materials. She is applying the CALPHAD thermodynamic method to predict magnets with reduced critical rare earth elements content.

Elder earned her doctoral degree in Materials Science from Northwestern University in 2021, and a master’s degree in Physics from McGill University in 2017.

June 2024