University of Memphis represented on international stage at 14th International Fatigue Congress
July 22, 2026
When the 14th International Fatigue Congress (IFC14) kicked off on June 28 in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, one of the first voices attendees heard was from the University of Memphis (UofM).
Dr. Ali Fatemi, Ring Companies Endowed Professor and Chair of the Herff College of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering, gave the opening plenary lecture, “The Role of Defects on Fatigue Strength and Modeling of Their Effects with Applications to AM Metals.” The lecture was co-authored by Professor Yukitaka Murakami of Kyushu University in Japan. However, Professor Murakami could not attend the conference.
Out of 10 plenary lectures presented, the University of Memphis provided the only voice from North America. “It’s an honor,” Fatemi said. “It’s a recognition of the University of Memphis as a prominent institution in fatigue of materials and structures research.”
Other plenary lecture presenters came from the Oxford University of UK, the Institute of Metal Research in China, Airbus Operations Gmbh in Germany, RMIT University in Austrália, the Imperial College in the UK, Northwestern Polytechnical University in China, the University of Austria, and Politecnico di Milano in Italy.
“The subject of 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, is a big area of investigation by many academic researchers and industries because it has broad applications, such as in the biomedical industry, in the aerospace industry, and many others. The 3D printing process is making an object layer by layer. That’s why it’s called 3D printing. So, very thin layers are deposited on top of each other to make very complex parts from digital 3D models.”
“In Memphis, specifically, the biomedical industry, like Medtronic and Smith & Nephews, is using additive manufacturing to make body implants because this process has a lot of advantages. But one of the main challenges with additive manufacturing is that it has defects and imperfections, which often serve as fatigue crack initiation sites. Fatigue is a progressive damage process and the major cause of mechanical failure resulting from repeated stresses experienced by most engineering structures. So, my talk was about how to model these defects during the design process for reliable performance predictions,” Fatemi said. The model presented extends the application of the Fatemi-Socie fatigue theory, which has been widely used by researchers and practitioners for several decades, to fatigue of additive manufactured materials.
The opening plenary lecture was just one of three presentations Fatemi gave during the conference. The other two presentations were co-authored by graduate students from the Mechanical Engineering Fatigue and Fracture Research Laboratory. The International Fatigue Congress series is the prominent forum for fatigue research and applications held every four years in different countries. IFC14 in Madeira had several hundred talks by researchers from around the world presented in five parallel sessions throughout the week.
"Publishing in high-impact journals, authoring widely adopted textbooks, and presenting plenary or keynote lectures at major international conferences all help the institution with name recognition and research reputation. It makes it much easier to attract and recruit top talent for faculty, postdoc, and graduate student positions,” Fatemi said.