Farewell, Prof. Jimmy!
Last month, we said goodbye to a colleague who we greatly appreciated and who had been a member of our scientific team since 2007. At 15.08.2018 Dr. Junhe Lian took up his position as Assistant Professor for Advanced Steel and Applications in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Aalto University in Helsinki. After studying metallurgical engineering at the University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB) and RWTH Aachen University for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Junhe Lian or Jimmy, as he was called here, started in 2009 as a research assistant at the Steel Institute (IEHK). In 2015, he received his doctoral degree with a thesis on 'A generalised hybrid damage mechanics model for steel sheets and heavy plates'. This was followed by an extremely successful academic career in the team of Sebastian Münstermann, after whose appointment as professor for integrity of materials and structures research department, he took over the leadership of the Damage Tolerance working group in 2016. Under Mr. Lian's leadership, a close collaboration with USTB was developed, which resulted in the visit of many China Scholarship Council (CSC) scholarship holders to the IEHK. Mr. Lian was involved in the further development of the Bai-Wierzbicki damage model, which is also highly appreciated by the original developer Prof. Wierzbicki, so that in summer 2018, he got the opportunity for a research stay at the Impact and Crashworthiness Laboratory (ICL) of Prof. Wierzbicki at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. The culmination of his academic career to date was his appointment to Aalto University in May 2018. Even though it is with a heavy heart that we now have to say goodbye to Prof. Jimmy, a very popular colleague and extremely capable scientist, we wish him all the best for his future career and many more productive and successful cooperations, especially with the Steel Institute.