Adam Ellison, a corporate fellow at Corning Inc., will deliver the annual Samuel R. Scholes Sr. Memorial Lecture at 11:20 a.m. on April 19 in Holmes Auditorium, Harder Hall, on the Alfred University campus. Sponsored by the Kazuo Inamori School of Engineering, his talk, “Glass Breaks: Why?” will explore why glasses “have fabulous strength in compression,” but “fail readily under tension.” “Experts in fracture mechanics typically ascribe the tendency of glass to fail under tension to flaws, particularly surface flaws, and it is unquestionably the case that mitigation of such flaws can greatly improve the strength of glass objects,” said Ellison.

Admitting he’s no “expert on failure mechanics” leaves Ellison “unfettered to consider the following question: how might I make a glass behave more like a plastic or ductile material under tension?”

Ellison earned a Ph.D. in geology from Brown University and then spent four years at Princeton University as a postdoctoral fellow. He then spent over five years as a staff scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, where he twice received the Pacesetter Award for Excellence in Achievement, as well as the Director’s Outstanding Achievement Award.

The Scholes Lecture honors the memory of Samuel Scholes, Sr., Ph.D., founder of the glass science program in the Inamori School of Engineering at Alfred University. The university is the only U.S. institution, and only the third in the world, to offer a doctorate in glass science.

For more information, visit www.alfred.edu.