Greg Olson, Sc.D.

Chief Science Officer

Education

Sc.D. Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1974

M.S. Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1970

B.S. Materials Science and Engineering,Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1970

Current Role at QuesTek

Gregory B. Olson, Sc.D. is a co-founder of QuesTek Innovations LLC and an internationally-recognized leader and pioneer in the field of computational materials design. As QuesTek’s Chief Science Officer with over forty years of research and consulting experience in the area of materials science and engineering, he oversees QuesTek’s application of the systems-based Materials by Design® approach, which he developed, for all alloy modeling and design projects, and the vision of expanding computational materials design into new markets. In 2012, Dr. Olson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, cited as the “father of materials design” for pioneering the field of computational design of materials as dynamic multiscale systems.

Background and Specialization

Dr. Olson recently joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Thermo-Calc Professor of the Practice in January 2020. Prior to this, he had been the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University where he was a member of the faculty from 1988-2019. Throughout his tenure at Northwestern, he served as a member of the University’s Materials Research Center (MRC), a co-Director of the University’s Materials Technology Laboratory, and the Director of the MRC’s Steel Research Group (SRG), a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, industry-supported research program that focuses on applying scientific principles to design new classes of high performance ultra-high strength steels. He is also the co-director of the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD), a NIST-sponsored center of excellence for advanced materials research with a broad consortium of partners including the University of Chicago (UC), Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), and QuesTek Innovations.

Honors, Awards and Patents

He is the recipient of numerous awards, including:

  • TMS Morris Cohen Award, 2013
  • Foreign Member, Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, 2013
  • Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2012
  • ASM Gold Medal, 2011
  • Member, National Academy of Engineering, 2010
  • Golick Lecturer, Missouri University of Science & Technology, 2009
  • Kelly Lecture, University of Cambridge, 2008

Professional Associations
He is active in numerous industry, technical and professional associations, including:

  • ASM International, including Chairman of ASM’s Phase Transformation Committee (1987–1990)
  • The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS)
  • The American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME)
  • Materials Research Society (MRS)
  • American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
  • Chairman, Organizing Committee, International Conference on Martensitic Transformations 2008 (ICOMAT-08).

Publications and Presentations
He is the author of two books, a contributor to more than 10 books, and the author of more than 300 publications which have appeared in leading industry journals. He is an inventor on over a dozen granted patents and multiple active patent applications.