Professor Gwénaëlle Proust was an undergraduate in La Rochelle and Nantes in France where she received an Engineering Degree in Materials in 1999. She then moved to Philadelphia in the USA to attend grad school at Drexel University in the department of Materials Science and Engineering. In 2002, she obtained a Masters degree by completing a thesis about adhesion between aluminum surfaces and polyurethane films. In 2002, Associate Professor Proust joined Dr. Surya Kalidindi's group to work on his microstructure sensitive design project. She had a side project in collaboration with Dr. Roger Doherty and Dr. Surya Kalidindi on characterization of aluminum, copper and titanium elastic and plastic anisotropy using nanoindentation and electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD). She obtained her PhD degree in April 2005.
In May 2005, she moved to New Mexico to become a post-doc at Los Alamos National Laboratory in a team working on multiscale modeling of polycrystalline metals. Her mentor at the lab was Dr. Carlos Tomé. She worked on developing constitutive models to predict the stress-strain response and texture evolution of zirconium and magnesium during strain-path change deformation. Gwénaëlle also characterized the microstructure and twinning evolution of zirconium and titanium samples using EBSD and developed a program to automatically recognized twinned domains in collaboration with Rodney McCabe.
Professor Proust has been with the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney in 2008.