Dr Hamid Pourasiabi (BEng (Hons), Meng, PhD) has 14+ years of research, development, teaching and professional engineering experiences in Materials and Metallurgical Engineering, with specialized expertise in the areas of physical metallurgy; microscopy and characterization of materials; alloy design for targeted applications; evaluation of mechanical, tribological and physical properties of materials; manufacturing; and tribology. His first exposure to the world of electron microscopy was in the last year of his BEng degree where he needed to fix a LEO 440i SEM in order to take micrographs from his magnetic garnets based on the oxides of Yb, Eu, Sm, Gd and Nd. Afterward he, as a research assistant, worked in the microscopy lab on several research projects and held several training workshops before his MEng where he used electrons microscopy more intensively for wear damage characterisation in cast irons and steels. During his professional engineering practice, he frequently used electron microscopes (mainly SEM) as the powerful tool for various characterisation purposes. In his PhD research and post-doc research professional role at The University of Queensland (UQ), he has been extensively using SEM techniques to investigate the interaction between the wear components and microstructural features of ultra-abrasion-resistant ferrous materials in high- and low-stress abrasion environments.

Dr. Parvez Alam
The University of Edinburgh, UK

Dr. Hamid Pourasiab is a Reader in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His activities and interests are in the fields of biomimetic design, mechanical metamaterials and composites engineering. His research a number of different biological organisms from a structure-properties perspective, and am active in developing mechanical materials and multi-body systems.