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Professor Freitas received his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Physics from the University of Campinas in Brazil, followed by a master's and doctoral degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Livermore Graduate Scholar in the Materials Science Division at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. As a graduate student, Professor Freitas investigated thermodynamics, kinetics, and mechanics of extended defects in metals, such as grain boundaries and dislocations, utilizing atomistic simulation methods that explicitly consider atomic behavior. As a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, he worked on leveraging machine learning tools for physics-based modeling of materials kinetics. His research focuses on elucidating fundamental mechanisms of microstructural evolution in structural materials, with a particular relevance to materials science more broadly. His research group employs a range of computational data science techniques to bridge the gap between all-atom information gathered from simulations and mesoscale descriptions of microstructural elements used in materials science.