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Edwin Alexander Peraza Hernandez is an undergraduate student in aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University. He will receive his B.S. degree in Dec. 2012. He is currently an undergraduate researcher in the Shape Memory Alloy Research Team at Texas A&M University. His research interests include the fabrication, characterization, and modeling of micro and nano materials and structures. He is a member of AIAA, Tau Beta Pi, Phi Kappa Phi, Golden Key International Honour Society, Phi Eta Sigma, and Sigma Gamma Tau.

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Kaushik Das was born in West Bengal, India in 1981. He received a M.Tech degree in aerospace engineering and a Ph.D. degree in engineering mechanics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, USA, in 2005 and 2009, respectively. He is currently a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. His research interests include computational mechanics, smart structures and materials, nano-structured materials, and microelectromechanical systems.

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Dimitris C. Lagoudas received his B.S. from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 1982. He then went to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Penn., where he earned his Ph.D. in 1986. He pursued his postdoctoral studies from 1986-1988 at Cornell University and Max Planck Institute in Germany in theoretical and applied physics/mechanics. Next, he went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. and taught from Sep. 1988 to June 1993. Lagoudas arrived at Texas A&M University in July 1992, where he remains today. Lagoudas currently is the Department Head and the inaugural recipient of the John and Bea Slattery Chair in Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University. He serves as the Director for the Texas Institute for Intelligent Materials and Structures (TiiMS). His research involves the design, characterization, and constitutive modeling of multifunctional material systems at nano, micro, and macro levels using micromechanics methods developed to bridge the various length scales and functionalities including mechanical, thermal, and electrical. His research team is recognized internationally especially in the area of modeling and characterization of shape memory alloys.
He has authored or co-authored about 365 scientific publications (150 in archival journals). For his scientific work on multifunctional materials, he received two best paper awards from ASME. He is co-author of a monograph on gauge theories of defects, and edited several special issues of journals and proceedings volumes in addition to a textbook on shape memory alloys co-authored with his graduate students. He has seven disclosures of invention and concepts developed for industry and a software license. During the past two decades he has published extensively on the subject of shape memory alloys with his students, postdoctoral associates, and colleagues and several of his journal papers are now considered classic papers in the field. The theoretical models that his research group developed have now been implemented and integrated into finite element analysis software, which have been used by many academic institutions around the world and also industry and government (Boeing, DoD, and NASA). He received the 2006 ASME Adaptive Structures and Material Systems Prize in recognition of his contributions to the modeling and characterization of shape memory alloys and their use in aerospace structures. Over the past two decades, his research has been supported by various government agencies including NSF, NASA, ONR, ARO, AFOSR, DARPA, DoE, and the state of Texas. He has collaborated with many industrial partners such as Bell Helicopter, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Schlumberger, and Tenaries. He has also worked with national labs, including DoD labs and NASA centers, either directly or through cooperative research and development agreements. He is an Associate Editor for the two main journals on smart structures and he helped organize numerous conferences through professional societies such as AIAA, ASME, SPIE, and SES, for which he served in various capacities. He is an alumnus of the prestigious Defense Science Study Group, and he has served on NRC panels. He also served as the Co-chair of NASA's Roadmap panel for nanotechnologies. He was the inaugural recipient of one of the two Ford Motor Company Professorships at Texas A&M, he is a TEES fellow, a TAMU Faculty Fellow, and he is an Associate Fellow of AIAA and a Fellow of ASME. He was selected as an SES Fellow in 2009. He served as an Associate Vice President for Research for Texas A&M University from 2001-2004, and as the First Chair of the Materials Science and Engineering Program at TAMU from 2001-2003.

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