Faculty, students, and alumni highlighted at AISTech

Monica Cooney

Jun 2, 2025

Three men standing, two holding awards

Source: Association for Iron & Steel Technology (AIST)

Pistorius (left) is pictured with Fred Harnack, (2025 AIME Honorary Member recipient) and Steve Gardner, President of AIME.

The Association for Iron & Steel Technology (AIST) recently hosted its annual AISTech meeting in Nashville, where several faculty, students, and alumni of the materials science and engineering (MSE) department at Carnegie Mellon were recognized for their accomplishments and shared their research. 

Professor Chris Pistorius was named as an American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) Honorary Member at the conference. AIME Honorary Membership is one of the highest honors the Institute bestows on an individual. Pistorius’s award citation read as follows: “In recognition of his iron and steel research and his commitment to preparing the steel industry’s next generation workforce. As a contributing researcher on hundreds of technical papers and as editor of AIST Transactions, his expertise has contributed significantly to the advancement of iron and steel technology. With his mentorship of 50+ master’s students and 30+ Ph.D. candidates, his work epitomizes the ideals of AIST and AIME membership.”

Additionally, Pistorius and alumnus Deepo Kumar (Ph.D. ‘18) were the recipients of the 2025 Charles H. Herty Jr. Award for their paper entitled “On (%FeO)-[%C] Correlation During Primary Steelmaking,” along with co-authors Nurni Viswanathan and M.P. Gururajan of IIT Bombay. The award is presented annually to the author(s) of an oxygen steelmaking technical paper judged by the AIST Oxygen Steelmaking Technology Committee. The award’s namesake, Herty Jr., was known for his practical application of scientific principles to steel plant use.

  • Group photo of students and faculty
    The decarbSTEEL faculty and student team.
  • three men standing with two holding awards
    Matt Wilson (member of the Oxygen Steelmaking Technology Committee) with Deepo Kumar and Chris Pistorius. (photo credit: AIST)
  • two men standing
    Alumnus Tadashi Furuhara (Ph.D. '89) and Pistorius (photo credit: AIST)
  • Two women holding blue ribbons
    Rafaela Rapalo and Eileen Hung showcase their awards.
  • group photo of students standing at table
    Students from CMU attended networking events during the conference.

    • An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon’s MSE and engineering and public policy (EPP) departments shared their decarbSTEEL (Decarbonizing Steelmaking TechnoEconomic EvaLuation) tool at the conference. The project, which was supported through a Sustainable Technologies for Steel Manufacturing Grant from AIST, is an open-source, highly customizable Excel-based framework for assessing the cost and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of various steel decarbonization strategies. Pistorius, along with EPP’s Valerie Karplus were faculty leads on the project, with student contributors including Elina Hoffman, Emily Allendorf, Eileen Hung, Shashank Swaminathan, Albert Chang, Adwait Joshi, and Yucheng Zhang. 

    Alumnus Tadashi Furuhara (Ph.D. '89), who is currently a professor at Tohoku University in Japan, received the AIST Howe Memorial Lectureship award at the conference, presenting on the paper “Roles of Thermomechanical Processing on Microstructure of High-Strength Steels.” The biannual award honors the late professor Henry Marion Howe, who helped turn steelmaking from an art into a science.

    Carnegie Mellon students earned first place honors in both graduate and undergraduate research presentations. Rafaela Rapalo was recognized in the Graduate Poster Contest for her poster presentation, "Pellet Size Affects Hydrogen Reduction Rate" and Eileen Hung was the winner of the Undergraduate Project Presentation Contest.