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Ian Robertson currently serves as the Director of the Division of Materials Research at the National Science Foundation.  He is a Donald B. Willett Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He joined the Metallurgy and Mining Engineering Department at the University of Illinois in 1982 as a post-doctoral fellow and was appointed as an assistant professor in 1984, associate professor in 1989, professor in 1995, and served as Head of the Department from 2005-2009.  He received a B.Sc. degree (first class) in Applied Physics from Strathclyde University, Glasgow Scotland in 1978 and his D.Phil from the University of Oxford in 1982.  Professor Robertson is a member of TMS, MRS, and APS, and a Fellow of ASM International.  His research focuses on the use of the electron microscope as an experimental laboratory in which dynamic experiments can be conducted to reveal the atomistic processes responsible for the macroscopic response of a material. He has applied this technique to enhance our understanding of the reaction pathways and kinetics that occur during deformation, phase transformation, irradiation and hydrogen embrittlement of metallic materials.  His insight to the mechanisms responsible for hydrogen embrittlement of metals was recognized by the Department of Energy in 1984 when he, along with Howard Birnbaum, received the DOE prize for Outstanding Scientific Accomplishment in Metallurgy and Ceramics.   He has been a Principal Editor for the Journal of Materials Research since 1995, and a Key Reader for Metallurgical Transactions since 1994, and recently become a member of the editorial board of Microscopy Today and Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Current Opinion in Solid State and Materials Science.