Samantha Daly

Samantha Daly is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), affiliated with the College of Engineering. Her research focuses on the statistical quantification of microstructural features and their effects on material properties, with applications in advanced materials like active materials, ceramics, and high-temperature composites. She specializes in multi-scale material characterization, fatigue mechanisms, and experimental mechanics.

Education: PhD and MS from the California Institute of Technology, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering (modified with Mathematics) from Dartmouth University. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Research interests include solid mechanics, materials behavior at microscale, fracture mechanics, and the development of novel experimental techniques such as digital image correlation (DIC) combined with SEM. Her work bridges computational modeling and experimental validation, as seen in frameworks like PRISMS.

Key awards include the ASME Centennial Mid-Career Award, NSF Early CAREER Award, and DOE Early Career Research Program Award. Her publications span topics like deformation twin identification in magnesium, fatigue crack growth in shape memory alloys, and advanced SEM imaging techniques.

Advising and grants: While specific student names aren’t listed, her group collaborates extensively on NSF- and DOE-funded projects. Her lab, the Daly Group, emphasizes multi-scale characterization and experimental mechanics, contributing to both academic and industrial materials research.

Labs/Teams: The Daly Group at UCSB, involved in the PRISMS initiative (Predictive Integrated Structural Materials Science), focuses on accelerating materials science through open-source frameworks and multi-scale modeling.