Hello, My name is Jeevan Dalip and I am a PhD student in the Hufnagel group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins. My work focuses on using x-ray imaging techniques to visualize and quantify rapid material deformation. During violent planetary and ballistic impact events, materials experience phenomena such as fracture and granular flow. Cracks and voids develop in  the microstructure of the material as it deforms. These events can occur as quickly as a few microseconds, and we want to image and visualize them as they happen to better understand the deformation mechanism in the material’s microstructure. Microcomputed tomography (micro-CT) is a traditional absorption-based x-ray imaging technique that is useful in capturing the 3-dimensional microstructure of a material. However, it is based on collecting many images of the material, which makes it too slow to image rapid events. Instead, X-ray Phase Contrast Imaging is a technique that is sensitive to refractive effects, which makes it excellent at imaging cracks and voids in a material. This produces images that encode more information than a single micro-CT image, making phase-contrast imaging an excellent candidate for imaging extreme events both qualitatively and quantitatively. Even more important is that it can be done very rapidly, with single images formed in less than a microsecond. In our group, we use our unique in-lab x-ray imaging machine and synchrotron experiments to obtain phase-contrast images and study dynamic events. My research focuses on developing a physics-based model for extracting quantitative microstructural data about a material from phase-contrast images. This model ultimately aims to enhance our ability to visualize and understand material response to these phenomena.