Dr. Stuart Wright, Senior Scientist, EDAX

One of the first scientific conferences I had the good fortune of attending was the Eighth International Conference on Textures of Materials (ICOTOM 8) held in 1987 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was an undergraduate student at the time and had recently joined Professor Brent Adams’ research group at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. It was quite an introduction to texture analysis. Most of the talks went right over my head but the conference would affect the direction my educational and professional life would take.

Professor Adams’ research at the time was focused on orientation correlation functions. While his formulation of the equations used to describe these correlations was coming along nicely, the experimental side was quite challenging. One of my tasks for the research group was to explore using etch pits to measure orientations on a grain-by-grain basis. It was a daunting proposition for an inexperienced student. At the ICOTOM in Santa Fe, Brent happened to catch a talk by a Professor from the University of Bristol named David Dingley. David introduced the ICOTOM community to Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) in the SEM. Brent immediately saw this as a potential experimental solution to his vision for a statistical description of the spatial arrangement of grain orientations in polycrystalline microstructures.

After returning to BYU, Brent quickly went about preparing to get David to BYU to install the first EBSD system in North America. Instead of etch pits, my Master’s degree became comparing textures measured by EBSD and those measured with traditional X-Ray Pole Figures. I had the opportunity to make some of the first EBSD measurements with David’s system. From those early beginnings, Brent’s group moved to Yale University where we successfully built an automated EBSD system laying the groundwork for the commercial EBSD systems we use today.

I’ve had the good fortune to attend every ICOTOM since that one in Santa Fe over 30 years ago now. The ICOTOM community has helped germinate and incubate EBSD and continues to be a strong supporter of the technique. This is evident in the immediate rise in the number of texture studies undertaken using EBSD immediately after EBSD was introduced to the ICOTOM community.

Things have a way of coming full circle and now I am part of a group of three (with David Fullwood of BYU and my colleague Matt Nowell of EDAX) whose turn it is to host the next ICOTOM in St George Utah in November 2017. The ICOTOM meetings are held every three years and generally rotate between Europe, the Americas and Asia. At ICOTOM 18 we will be celebrating 25 years since our first papers were published using OIM.

It is a humbling opportunity to pay back the texture community, in just a small measure, for the impact my friends and colleagues within this community have had both on EBSD and on me personally. It is exciting to consider what new technologies and scientific advances will be germinated by the interaction of scientists and engineers in the ICOTOM environment. All EBSD users would benefit from attending ICOTOM and I invite you all to join us next year in Utah’s southwest red rock country for ICOTOM 18! (http://event.registerat.com/site/icotom2017/)