Leora Dresselhaus-Marais

Leora is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, with a courtesy appointment in Mechanical Engineering, a term appointment in Photon Science at the SLAC National Accelerator Lab, and an appointment as a Precourt Center Fellow. Before coming to Stanford, Leora was a Lawrence Fellow in the Physics Division of the Physics and Life Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, where she developed the tools to study time-resolved defect dynamics in bulk materials -- giving new insights into long-standing problems in materials science. She led a large collaboration towards these goals and was involved in many projects that used dark-field X-ray microscopy and other tools to study dislocation patterning, recovery in metals, ultrahigh strength materials, radiation damage, automation and shape recognition methods. Leora did her PhD in Physical Chemistry with Prof. Keith Nelson at MIT, where she demonstrated how shock waves initiate chemistry in RDX that couples to deformations in unique ways that enhance the sensitivity. During that work, she also developing the ultrafast microscope for the study, which took movies with 300 billion frames per second of how quasi-2D shock waves converge, and adapted computer vision methods to quantify the imaging results. Leora did her BA and MSc in Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania.