Alexis Devitre is a research assistant professor with the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute’s Fusion Technology and Materials for Extreme Environments Convergent Research Initiative.

Devitre’s current research focuses on material interfaces and their responses to radiation in coupled extreme environments, using facilities at the Tennessee Ion Beam and Materials Laboratory (TIBML) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He explores the performance of materials in coupled extreme environments, such as fusion and fission reactors — where large temperature and pressure gradients, high currents and strong magnetic fields conspire with radiation effects to cause accident scenarios that can unfold in milliseconds to decades.

He has built several cryogenic irradiation targets with onboard properties and microstructural measurement techniques. These include facilities for mapping the critical surface of superconductors with electric transport measurements (15-300 K, 0-14 T); quantifying changes in thermal and elastic properties of materials (30-1100 K) with transient grating spectroscopy, and characterizing vacancy-type defect populations with positron annihilation spectroscopy.

Education