Rate My Professor Avala Lavakumar

Avala Lavakumar serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, a role he assumed in 2023. He completed his BTech in 2010 at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology), Hyderabad, followed by an MTech in 2012 from the National Institute of Technology, Durgapur. In 2021, he earned his PhD from Kyoto University, Japan. Subsequently, he pursued postdoctoral research at Kyoto University from 2021 to 2022 and at Kyushu University, Japan, from 2022 to 2023. His earlier academic career includes serving as an Assistant Professor at Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology, Burla, Odisha, from 2014 to 2018, and as an Adhoc Assistant Professor at Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, from 2012 to 2014.

Dr. Lavakumar's research expertise lies in in-situ deformation studies, leveraging advanced characterization techniques such as Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Digital Image Correlation (DIC), and Synchrotron X-ray diffraction. His academic interests include Transformation- and Twinning-Induced Plasticity (TRIP/TWIP) materials, martensite, steels, titanium and aluminum alloys, high- and medium-entropy alloys, and heterogeneous structured materials. He has contributed significantly to materials science literature with key publications such as "Modes of failure of cemented tungsten carbide tool bits (WC/Co): A study of wear parts" (International Journal of Refractory Metals and Hard Materials, 2016), "Concepts in physical metallurgy" (Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2016), "A 'new' empirical equation to describe the strain hardening behavior of steels and other metallic materials" (Materials Science and Engineering: A, 2021), "Yield and flow properties of ultra-fine, fine, and coarse grain microstructures of FeCoNi equiatomic alloy at ambient and cryogenic temperatures" (Scripta Materialia, 2023), "Role of surrounding phases on deformation-induced martensitic transformation of retained austenite in multi-phase TRIP steel" (Materials Science and Engineering: A, 2023), and "Deep learning-based noise filtering toward millisecond order imaging by using scanning transmission electron microscopy" (Scientific Reports, 2022).