Rate My Professor Kevin Laws

Associate Professor Kevin Laws serves in the School of Materials Science and Engineering within the Faculty of Science at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. His research is centered on the design, discovery, and development of amorphous alloys, with a particular emphasis on bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) and their associated processing, thermal, and mechanical properties. Laws investigates Mg- and Al-based metallic glasses tailored for structural and functional applications, alongside amorphous alloy matrix composites. His methodologies include die-casting, strip casting, and various post-production processing techniques for BMGs.

Laws' career trajectory includes a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at UNSW commencing in 2008, and the role of Project Manager for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Design in Light Metals since 2009. He has undertaken prestigious visiting positions, including as a Visiting Scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland in 2010, and at the United States Air Force Research Laboratories in Dayton, Ohio, USA in 2011. These appointments underscore his international recognition in the field. Earlier, he was awarded the ARC Centre of Excellence Postdoctoral Research Fellowship starting in 2007.

His scholarly output is prolific and influential, featuring publications in premier journals. Key contributions include "Accelerated discovery of metallic glasses through iteration of machine learning and high-throughput experiments" published in Science Advances in 2018, which has garnered 603 citations; "A predictive structural model for bulk metallic glasses" in Nature Communications in 2015 with 204 citations; "Ca–Mg–Zn bulk metallic glasses as bioresorbable metals" in Acta Biomaterialia in 2012 (117 citations); and "High entropy brasses and bronzes–Microstructure, phase evolution and properties" in Journal of Alloys and Compounds in 2015 (99 citations). More recent works address advanced topics such as the corrosion behaviour of CuxMnyZnzNi5Al2.5 high entropy brasses (Journal of Solid State Electrochemistry, 2025), the structure of tungsten boride ε-phase (Acta Materialia, 2023/2025 corrigendum), and atomic dispersion in high-entropy liquid metal alloys (Small Structures, 2024). These publications demonstrate his impact on advancing metallic glass formation, high-entropy alloys, and their applications in corrosion-resistant materials, biomedical devices, and beyond.