The Hillert-Cahn lectureship was instituted in 2010 in recognition of the outstanding contributions of John Cahn and Mats Hillert to the science of phase transformations in solid materials.  It is awarded to a leading practitioner of the discipline at each PTM conference on recommendation of the organizing committee, and in consultation with Mats Hillert and former recipients.

Comment on the contributions of Mats Hillert and John Cahn:

Mats Hillert and John Cahn first made their presence widely felt in the 1950's with seminal publications: a wide-ranging contribution on the effects of interface curvature on phase transformations by Mats [1]; and a series of highly original papers by John with John Hilliard on the free energy of non-uniform solutions [2,3,4].  These and their many subsequent contributions played a major role in shaping the discipline.  They each possess great breadth of interest and depth of insight; in addition to hosts of other honors, each has had a volume published of his selected works [5,6].  Without the contributions of Mats Hillert and John Cahn, the science of phase transformations would be a quite different and significantly diminished discipline.

1. Mats Hillert, Jernkont. Ann., vol. 141, 1957, p. 11.

2. J. W. Cahn, J. E. Hilliard, J. Chem. Phys.,  vol. 28, 1958, p. 258.

3. J. W. Cahn, J. Chem. Phys., vol. 30, 1959, p. 1121.   

4. J. W. Cahn, J. E. Hilliard, J. Chem. Phys., vol. 31, 1959, p. 688.

5. "The selected works of John. W. Cahn", eds. W. Craig Carter, William C. Johnson,   

TMS, Warrendale, PA, 1998.

6. "Thermodynamics and phase transformations: the selected works of Mats Hillert",   

eds. John     ?gren, Yves Bréchet, Christopher Hutchinson, Jean Philibert, Gary Purdy, EDP publishers, France. 2006.

Previous Recipients:

2010 - Gary R. Purdy, McMaster University, Canada

2015 - Peter Voorhees, Northwestern University, United States of America