Why I Built This Website and What You Can Expect

March 14, 2026 · General · 3 min read

By Dr.-Ing. Faisal Qayyum. Facing this yourself? See how I can help.

In 2019, a PhD student from Southeast Asia emailed me about a crystal plasticity simulation problem he had been stuck on for three months. We fixed it in two email exchanges. He submitted his thesis eleven months later and cited our conversation in the acknowledgements. That exchange stayed with me — how much was sitting silently in my head that others were circling around for months, unable to find.

For over a decade, my work lived inside journal papers, conference proceedings, and simulation result files. Researchers who needed crystal plasticity expertise found me through ResearchGate or a colleague’s recommendation. Students discovered me through institutional contacts. That is a slow and opaque distribution for knowledge that should be openly accessible. This website changes that.

Why Now?

Impact requires visibility. My research in crystal plasticity simulation, metal forming, and microstructure characterisation has produced more than 50 publications and over 1,300 citations (Google Scholar, September 2026). I have supervised students from more than 15 countries, won personal grants and fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, JSPS, DAAD and the Joachim Herz Foundation, and coordinated DFG-funded projects.

Most of this work is locked behind academic paywalls or buried in institutional profiles. This website is my central platform for sharing expertise, attracting consulting inquiries, and writing directly for the researchers and engineers who can use it.

What I Bring to the Table

My core competence lies at the intersection of experiment and simulation. I use DAMASK for crystal plasticity finite element modeling, ABAQUS for large-scale metal forming and thermo-mechanical analysis, and MatCalc for thermodynamic phase transformation calculations. On the experimental side, I work with EBSD data through MTEX in MATLAB and develop custom analysis pipelines in Python.

This combination allows me to offer something rare: a consultant who understands both the physics inside the microstructure and the engineering demands of the forming process. Whether you are designing a new alloy, optimizing a rolling schedule, or trying to understand why a component failed in service, I can help you connect the dots from atoms to applications.

What to Expect on This Blog

This blog will serve multiple purposes. First, technical writing on simulation — already underway with guides on publishing DAMASK crystal plasticity research at the top of the field and what forming simulation gets right and where it breaks. These are the guides I wish I had when I started my PhD.

Second, reflections on academic life and career decisions — like whether to do a PhD or go to industry, and how to build a postdoc network before you need one. My experience running a Writing Club for over three years and designing the course "How to Write a Lot" has taught me that structured writing habits are the single most transferable research skill.

Third, I will write about multiscale modeling philosophy, the process-structure-property chain, and how emerging methods like phase field simulation and machine learning are reshaping materials science. These are the conversations happening at conferences, and I want to bring them here.