July 17, 2025 ISMANAM honors Paul Voyles with the prestigious Alain Reza Yavari Award Written By: Jason Daley Departments: Materials Science & Engineering Categories: Awards|Faculty Paul Voyles, the Harvey D. Spangler Professor in materials science and engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, received the 2025 Alain Reza Yavari Senior Scientist Award at the 29th International Symposium on Metastable, Amorphous, and Nanostructured Materials held in Bratislava, Slovakia, in late June. Paul Voyles (left) receives the 2025 Alain Reza Yavari award from Lindsay Greer, chair of the ISMANAM steering committee and Professor of Materials Science at Cambridge University. The annual award, one of the highest honors in the field of metastable materials, recognizes a scientist for research leadership, groundbreaking results and/or a highly distinguished career-long contribution. Voyles award cites his “world-leading contributions to research on metastable, amorphous and nanostructured materials.” The award is named after Alain Reza Yavari, who passed in 2015. Yavari was a distinguished researcher in materials science with a transdisciplinary approach to studying metastable and nanocrystalline materials. He established the International Symposium on Metastable, Amorphous, and Nanostructured Materials in 1994 as a platform for connecting researchers and sharing knowledge in the field. Voyles’ research specialty is the structure of materials, investigated primarily with electron microscopy, supplemented by simulations and data science. He works on metallic and other glasses and on materials for microelectronics, spintronics, and superconductors. His lab has pioneered the use of electron nanodiffraction in the form of fluctuation microscopy and electron correlation microscopy to study the atomic structure and dynamics of these glasses and liquids. Voyles was chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UW-Madison from 2016 to 2018 and is currently director of the NSF-funded Wisconsin Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. He has published over 220 journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. “I am honored to be included amongst the previous award winners, including Professor Yavari, one of the pioneers of amorphous and nanocrystalline materials,” says Voyles. “Thank you to all my collaborators at Wisconsin and beyond, and especially to the outstanding students I have had the good fortune to work with over the last 20 years.”