Bio: Elif Ertekin is an Andersen Faculty Scholar, Associate Professor, and Associate Head for Graduate Programs in the Mechanical Science and Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a faculty affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL). Her research interests center on the theory and modeling of materials, with an emphasis on probabilistic and stochastic methods. She focuses on developing a microscopic understanding of atomic and electronic-scale processes in materials, with applications in thermal transport, energy conversion, and defect chemistry. She received BS degrees in Mathematics and in Engineering Science and Mechanics from Penn State, a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from UC Berkeley, and she carried out post-doctoral work at the Berkeley Nanoscience and Nanoengineering Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Applied Physics and a Divisional Associate Editor for Physical Review Letters.