Atieh Moridi

Biography

Atieh Moridi is an associate professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at Cornell University. In recognition of her significant contributions to the field of additive manufacturing, she was appointed as the Aref and Manon Lahham Faculty Fellow in the college of engineering. Prior to her current role, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. She earned her Ph.D. Cum Laude (the highest institute honor) from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Since joining Cornell in 2019, she has received numerous honors, including the NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, DOE Early Career Award, TMS Early Career Award, TMS Young Innovator in the Materials Science of Additive Manufacturing Award, Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2D Scholars Award, and the Presidential Council of Cornell Women-Affinito Stewart Award. Her work advances novel material processing with unique properties, resulting in a series of patents. These innovations have also received support from the Cornell Technology Licensing-Ignite Program and the Scale-Up and Rapid Prototyping Award from the College of Engineering.

https://www.duffield.cornell.edu/people/atieh-moridi/

Abstract

Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Additive Manufacturing: Operando Insights into Microstructure Control and Materials Innovation

Metal additive manufacturing (AM) offers opportunities for materials design that extend far beyond geometrical complexity. The rapid solidification, repeated thermal cycling, and intense melt-pool dynamics intrinsic to AM create far-from-equilibrium conditions that can access phases, microstructures, and material combinations difficult or impossible to realize through conventional processing. Yet exploiting these conditions requires understanding how materials evolve during the process itself. In this talk, I will show how operando synchrotron X-ray diffraction and imaging, integrated with multiscale post-process characterization, can reveal these transient phenomena and guide new strategies for microstructure control and materials innovation.

Three examples illustrate this approach. First, we manipulate phase stability in multi principal-element alloys to interrupt epitaxial grain growth, with operando X-ray diffraction revealing transient metastable phases that govern the solidification pathway and resulting grain structure. Second, we introduce alloy amalgamation, in which existing alloys are combined during AM to access heterogeneous compositions and phase assemblages unavailable through conventional processing. Finally, we exploit the rapid solidification and vigorous melt-pool convection of AM to process nominally immiscible material systems. Operando X-ray imaging provides direct insight into melt-pool flow and mixing, informing the development of Fe–Mg composites with tunable degradation kinetics for bioresorbable implants. Together, these studies highlight the transformative potential of AM in controlling microstructural evolution and expanding the material design landscape.