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Departmental homepageDr Seita is the Granta Design Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he leads the Additive Microstructure Engineering Laboratory (AddME Lab). Before joining the University of Cambridge, Dr Seita was a Nanyang Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technical University (NTU) Singapore. During his tenure at NTU, he was awarded the prestigious Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellowship – a S$3m individual grant for early-career scientists – to develop novel additive manufacturing strategies for microstructure control of metal alloys. In recognition of this work, in 2023 Dr Seita received the TMS Young Innovator in the Materials Science of Additive Manufacturing Award from the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. He earned his PhD in Materials Science from ETH Zurich in 2012 and then spent three years as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. Dr Seita is the author of over 50 publications and the co-founder and technical lead of the venture XtaLight, which provides simpler, faster and more affordable microstructure analysis for quality control of metal parts.
Dr Seita teaches part of the Part IA Materials module (1P2), which introduces the properties of materials and how they relate to the material's underlying structure using appropriate mathematical models, and part of the Part IIA Materials Processing & Design module (3C1), which delves into materials processing technologies to design and manufacture products. Dr Seita is also Part IA lab co-ordinator for 1P2 and for the Extension activity "Product Disassembly", where students take apart household products to learn about choice of materials and processing technologies in their design and manufacturing.
The AddME Lab focuses on designing and producing metallic materials that don't yet exist, using advanced manufacturing technologies, including 3D printing. The work is underpinned by a solid knowledge of the mechanisms governing solidification of metals during additive manufacturing (AM), which are leveraged to engineer the material's microstructure across different length scales. Current research activities include developing characterisation techniques to assess the complex microstructure of metals produced by AM, investigating their mechanical properties as a function of such a microstructure and devising novel processing strategies to gain control over it to create unique "microstructure architectures" that combine multiple functionalities. The AddME Lab is one of the early pioneers of the site-specific microstructure control paradigm enabled by AM technology.
S. Gao, Z. Li, S. Van Petegem, J. Ge, G. Sneha, J. V. Vas, V. Luzin, Z. Hu, H. L. Seet, D. F. Sanchez, H. Van Swygenhoven, H. Gao, M. Seita; Additive manufacturing of alloys with programmable microstructure and properties, Nature Communications, 14, 6752.
M. Wittwer, M. Seita; A Machine Learning Approach to Map Crystal Orientation by Optical Microscopy, npj Computational Materials, 1, 8:8.
K. A. Sofinowski, S. Raman, X. G. Wang, B. Gaskey, M. Seita; Layer-wise engineering of grain orientation (LEGO) in selective laser melted stainless steel 316L, Additive Manufacturing, 38, 101809.
M. Seita, S. Gao; Broadening the design space of engineering materials through additive grain boundary engineering, Journal of Materials Science, Invited Viewpoint.
