Dr. Erik Mueller is a materials research engineer at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Washington, DC. He has performed over 100 failure investigations of aircraft, rail, pipeline, and marine transportation accidents, including those involving the GEnx engine fan midshaft, the Boeing 787 lithium-ion battery fires, the Casselton and Heimdal, ND train derailments, and the Centreville, VA pipeline leak. For his efforts on the latter case, Erik earned the John K. Lauber Award, which recognizes employee accomplishments that contributed substantially to the mission of the NTSB. In addition, he earned the 2018 Silver Medal Award from ASM International and received the Journal of Failure Analysis and Prevention 2018 Best Paper Award for his article entitled, “Investigation and Recommendations on Bottom-Dented Petroleum Pipelines.”
Prior to joining the NTSB, Dr. Mueller worked as a materials engineer with NAVAIR, a subsection of the US Navy, at NAS Jacksonville, FL. There he performed over 100 failure investigations on various fixed-wing Navy aircraft, such as the F/A-18, P-3C, and EA-6B. In 2011, he received the NAVAIR Air Vehicle Engineering Director’s Award for his work on the failure analysis and non-destructive inspection of F/A-18D lower wing skin disbonding/delamination defects.
Dr. Mueller served as an editor for the latest revisions of ASM Handbooks: Volume 3: Alloy Phase Diagrams and Volume 10: Materials Characterization (December 2019). He is currently a member of ASM’s Women in Materials Engineering Committee and serves on its retention subcommittee. Previously, he served on the Board of Directors for the Failure Analysis Society and as a member of the Handbook, Nominating, and Emerging Professionals Committees for ASM. Erik has volunteered at the ASM Eisenman Materials Camp each summer for the last six years, including serving as camp coordinator in 2018. The camp, funded by the ASM Materials Education Foundation, is a week-long summer camp that teaches failure analysis to high school students along with blacksmithing, sand casting, and microscopy. Erik has been the featured speaker at ASM Chapter meetings in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, and he has given graduate seminars at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Michigan.
He is a licensed professional engineer in Florida, Virginia, and the District of Columbia in the Metallurgical and Materials discipline. Erik helps teach a professional engineering exam review course for TMS every summer, and is involved in the Public and Government Affairs Committee for TMS. Previously, Erik worked with Engineers Without Borders (Jacksonville Professionals Chapter) performing service trips in Nebaj, Guatemala, where he helped design and employ water distribution and septic systems in rural villages.
Erik earned his Ph.D., Master’s, and Bachelor’s Degrees from the University of Florida. In graduate school, his research focused on characterization and modeling of high temperature corrosion of superalloys and model alloys coating systems in turbine engines. While earning his Ph.D., he served as Albert the Alligator, the official mascot of the University of Florida.
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