Engineering faculty member Joy Gockel honored by professional society for minerals, metals and materials

Joy Gockel, assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering, was honored by the The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society.

Joy Gockel, assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering at Wright State University, received a prestigious professional development award from TMS, the leading professional society for minerals, metals and materials.

Gockel was selected to receive one of the TMS 2021 Structural Materials Division Young Leaders Professional Development Award from The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS).

Gockel will be recognized during the virtual TMS 2021 annual meeting in March and will formally receive the award at the 2022 TMS annual meeting.

“This is a well-deserved award that recognizes her leadership in the area of additive manufacturing of metals,” said Raghu Srinivasan, professor and chair of the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Gockel’s research spans several aspects of additive manufacturing to understand the processing-structure-property-performance relationships through process modeling, in-situ monitoring, materials characterization and mechanical testing.

In 2020, Gockel and Tanvi Banerjee, associate professor of computer science, received a $500,000 federal grant to investigate a way to accelerate and improve the manufacturing of thermoelectric materials through additive manufacturing and machine learning.

TMS is a professional organization for materials scientists and engineers that encompasses the entire range of materials and engineering, from minerals processing and primary metals production to basic research and the advanced applications of materials.

The TMS Young Leaders Professional Development Award was created to help early career professionals advance in the field of materials science through participation in society activities. The award provides recipients with funding to travel to the TMS annual meeting and exhibition, where they are invited to participate in society leadership activities.

Gockel earned her bachelor’s degree in 2009 and master’s degree in 2010, both in mechanical engineering, from Wright State. Her research focused on analytical models to determine melt pool behavior in additive manufacturing. During her undergraduate study, she was a student researcher in the Materials Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory performing characterization tests for ceramic fibers and fiber coatings for ceramic matrix composites.

She earned her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 2014 from Carnegie Mellon University, where her research provided a foundational method in the relation of additive manufacturing processing parameters and melt pool geometry to microstructure.

Prior to joining the faculty at Wright State, Gockel was a lead engineer in research and development for GE Aviation’s Additive Development Center, where she specialized in the development of process parameters for new materials to satisfy design and mechanical property requirements and enable aerospace applications.