Assistant Professor Punit Kumar Named Among 35 Innovators Under 35

NTU MAE congratulates Assistant Professor Punit Kumar on being recognised in MIT Technology Review Asia Pacific's 35 Innovators Under 35 list.

The Innovators Under 35 list recognises outstanding young innovators whose technical work has the potential to shape the future and address major challenges. The awards span a wide range of fields, including biotechnology, materials, computer hardware, energy, transportation, communications, and the Internet.

Prof Kumar was recognised for his work in developing stronger and tougher materials for extreme environments. His research addresses a long-standing challenge in materials science: the difficulty of achieving both strength and toughness in refractory alloys, which are used in extreme environments such as aircraft engines, nuclear reactors and spacecraft.

Working with Professor Robert O. Ritchie's team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Prof Kumar discovered a "kink band" mechanism in a niobium-tantalum-titanium-hafnium (NbTaTiHf) medium-entropy alloy. The alloy showed high fracture toughness across a wide temperature range, from 77K to 1,473K.

The team found that kink bands form near cracks, helping to spread deformation across a wider area and making the material more resistant to fracture. This discovery opens a new paradigm for the damage-resistant design of refractory alloys.

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"I am honoured by this recognition, which reflects the collective efforts of my colleagues and mentors. Our work shows that understanding how materials break can help us make them harder to break, even under demanding conditions."

– Assistant Professor Punit Kumar

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Building on his work in understanding how materials deform and resist fracture, Prof Kumar is now developing a research platform at NTU that brings together additive manufacturing, fracture mechanics and AI-driven materials design. The platform aims to accelerate the discovery of structural materials for extreme environments.

Prof Kumar has also been awarded the National Research Foundation Fellowship, which supports early-career researchers in pursuing independent research.

"As I build my research group at NTU, I hope to continue exploring new ideas and mentoring the next generation of researchers, while turning curiosity into knowledge that can improve lives and society," said Prof Kumar.

Prof Kumar is one of the NTU faculty members named on this year's list. The NTU MAE community congratulates him on this well-deserved recognition and looks forward to supporting his research and the next generation of engineers he will mentor.

 

Read more about the NbTaTiHf alloy research: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn2428

Learn more about Prof Kumar's lab: https://medhalab.github.io/index.html