Kumar Ankit

Associate Professor, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy

Kumar Ankit is an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy at the Arizona State University. He received an integrated dual bachelor's/master's degree in metallurgical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) in 2010 and obtained a doctorate (2015) in mechanical engineering from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, where he graduated summa cum laude. Following graduation, he was appointed as Group Leader at KIT where his group specialized in Quantitative Phase-field Modeling. Prior to his appointment at ASU, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Texas A&M University where he worked in the area of modeling and simulations of pattern formation in vapor-deposited films.

Dr. Ankit is a recipient of the 2018 Robert Cahn prize which is jointly awarded by Springer Nature and the Journal of Materials Science, the 2016 German Research Foundation's (DFG) Young Investigator award, and the 2022 National Science Foundation's (NSF) CAREER award. In 2020, he, along with his collaborators at ASU and the University of Arizona - Tucson, co-founded the MateriAlZ Seminar series to promote student engagement in MSE through interactive sessions, increase the nationwide and international visibility of the Arizona universities and provide a platform for active discussions in different areas of MSE.

Ankit's group at ASU specializes in the development and application of mesoscopic modeling approaches and their integration with continuum approaches for both fundamental and applied research in microstructure science and engineering. His group is currently interested in deciphering computational pathways to optimally design microstructure processing routes. Target areas include solidification, solid-state transformations and grain coarsening in multicomponent alloys and geomaterials, electromigration-induced damage, and self-organization in polymers and vapor-deposited films.