W. Craig Carter

W. Craig Carter is an American materials scientist, a Toyota Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a co-founder of the 24M Technologies Company.

He is a specialist in the fields of meso-scale modelling of materials properties and processing. His research is focused on thermodynamics and kinetics of interfaces, simulations of microstructural evolution, and predictions of fracture and reliability in materials. He has also worked on battery materials.

He is a MacVicar Fellow and has received the MIT School of Engineering Bose Teaching Award. He has also been a recipient of Wolfram Innovator Award. He is a fellow of American Ceramic Society.

Education Carter studied material science and engineering and received his bachelor's, Masters and Doctoral degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1983, 1987, and 1989, respectively. He completed his post-doctoral studies in material science from NIST in 1991.

He also studied simulations of microstructural evolution and discussed two-dimensional calculations of anisotropic growth and coarsening for simulating the development microstructure in materials. He studied the applications of digital image model and modified it to include elastic strain energy at solid-fluid interfaces. He co-authored a public domain software to model microstructural properties from experimental images.

The Kobayashi-Warren-Carter Model Along with James A Warren and Ryo Kobayashi, Carter developed a phase-field model that incorporates crystallographic orientation as a microstructural parameter. The model has become known as the KWC model.

Complexions: Interface Structures and Transitions In the mid-2000s with Rowland Cannon and Ming Tang, he introduced a new concept of interface Complexion as a descriptor for the structure and local chemistry of a grain boundary.

Complexion transitions occur when a grain boundary's chemistry and/or structure change at a critical temperature, pressure, or a chemical potential. It was necessary to construct a new foundation for such transitions to distinguish them from phase transitions, because a grain boundary cannot be considered a phase as defined by Gibbs. and complexion transitions are distinct from phase transitions and are not constrained by the phase rule.

The original idea combined Cahn's Critical Wetting Theory and the KWC model

Science of battery materials In his later research, Carter directed his focus to the science of battery materials and the electro-chemo-mechanics of phase transitions and fracture of battery electrodes. He studied olivine compounds as enablers of positive electrode materials for high-power in lithium rechargeable batteries and discussed the miscibility gap in undoped Li1-xFePO4. He observed the elimination of the gap below a critical point.

Other professional activities Carter has also designed software to create forms and textures. He collaborated with Neri Oxman of the MIT Media Lab on projects incorporating material science, mythology and natural designs. Data and algorithms created for the Oxman work are publicly available. Carter is the designer of ONE.MIT which is a mosaic having more than 270,000 names from the MIT community etched on a 6-inch-diameter silicon wafer.

Awards and honors 1990 – Ross Coffin Purdy Award, American Ceramic Society 1996 – Robert Coble Young Scientist Award, American Ceramic Society 1999 – Fellow, American Ceramic Society 1999 – Technology of the Year, IndustryWeek Magazine 2005 – R.M. Fulrath Award, American Ceramic Society 2008 – Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, MIT 2008 – MacVicar Distinguished Teaching Fellow, MIT 2017 – Outstanding Educator Award, American Ceramic Society