David R. Gaskell (1940–2013) was Professor of Materials Engineering at Purdue University from 1982 to 2013. Dr. Gaskell was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and attended the Royal College of Science and Technology, receiving First Class Honors in metallurgy and technical chemistry for a BSc in 1962. He moved to Hamilton, Canada, to pursue graduate studies at McMaster University and then immigrated to the United States, teaching first at the University of Pennsylvania and then at Purdue. During his career, he served as a visiting professor at the NRC Atlantic Regional Laboratory, Canada, and at the G. C. Williams Cooperative Research Centre for Extraction Metallurgy in the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia. Professor Gaskell was dedicated to teaching and was the recipient of the Reinhardt Schumann Jr. Best Undergraduate Teacher Award in Materials Engineering several times over.
Matthew John M. Krane (1964– ) is Professor of Materials Engineering at Purdue University and a member of the Purdue Center for Metal Casting Research and the Purdue Heat Treatment Consortium. Using modeling and experiments, his research focuses on the connection between macroscopic transport phenomena and defect formation during materials processes, particularly the study of the solidification of metal alloys. Professor Krane has been with Purdue’s School of Materials Engineering since 1996, but his education is in mechanical engineering (Cornell, BS, 1986; Pennsylvania, MS, 1989; Purdue, PhD, 1996), with a concentration in heat transfer and fluid flow. He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Birmingham (UK), the University of Greenwich (UK), and the Université de Lorraine (Nancy, France). In addition to consulting, research programs, and undergraduate projects with the metals processing industry during his time at Purdue, he worked in industry for three years on thermal issues in the design and manufacturing of electronic packaging.