This award was established in 2010 to honor Adolf Martens, a pioneer in establishing structure-property relationships in steel and one of the first researchers to utilize optical microscopy to observe that hard steels had different features than soft steels at the microscale. The Adolf Martens Lecture recognizes the achievement of significant, broadly known technical accomplishments that have enabled important advances in processing and product application in the field of ferrous physical metallurgy, and have either provided dramatic contributions to the field or made a lifetime of important contributions to the field.