2010 saw Prof Rainer Schmid-Fetzer of the TU Clausthal, Germany, and one of the longest standing members of the MSIT, awarded the prestigious Hume-Rothery award from the Institute of Materials, Mineral and Mining of the United Kingdom. The award was presented at the annual dinner of the Institute in October at their Grantham conference centre. Dedicated to the memory of Professor Hume-Rothery, this annual award is presented in recognition of distinguished achievements concerned with phase relationship in metallic materials or non-metallic materials of metallurgical interest. and has been presented to other distinguished materials scientists, such as Taiji Nishizawa (2007), Riccardo Ferro (2006), Fred Hayes (1998), Larry Kaufman (1996), Himo Ansara (1995) and Mats Hillert (1991), a number of which are past members of the MSIT.
The Institute gave the award to Rainer in recognition of his outstanding international career spanning over three decades, specialising in phase equilibria study by experiment and calculation from thermodynamic data and his interest in industrial applications of research. He has developed computer programs and techniques to calculate phases equilibria and has provided sets of self-consistent parameters for calculation purposes by critically assessing phase diagrams and thermodynamic data.