Professor De Graef received his BS and MS degrees in physics from the University of Antwerp (Belgium) in 1983, and his Ph.D. in physics from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) in 1989, with a thesis on copper-based shape memory alloys. He then spent three and a half years as a post-doctoral researcher in the Materials Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara before joining Carnegie Mellon in 1993 as an assistant professor.He is currently professor and co-director of the J. Earle and Mary Roberts Materials Characterization Laboratory.