Robert Maass obtained his PhD in Materials Science from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), after which he joined the California Institute of Technology as an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral scholar. After working as a specialist management consultant for metals at McKinsey & Co., he transferred to the University of Göttingen as a junior research group leader. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 2015, where he still enjoys an adjunct appointment.

Since 2020 he is head of the Materials Engineering Department and a member of the directorate at the Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing (BAM) in Berlin, Germany. To date, he has published more than 100 international peer-reviewed articles in mechanical metallurgy. His honors include the Emmy Noether award, the NSF Career award, the Masing memorial medal, and the TMS Young Leaders award. His research interests revolve around microstructure-property relations, size effects, strain localization and defect structures of amorphous and crystalline metals, defect dynamics, mechanical properties, microplasticity, glass transition phenomena, and test system development.

TMS has been his societal home since 2007, where he has been active in various committees, including the Mechanical Behavior of Materials Committee, the Nanomechanical Materials Behavior Committee, and the Emerging Professionals Committee (formerly the Young Professionals Committee). He has organized/co-organized eight symposia at the annual meeting, has been an Structural Materials Division representative on the programming committee since 2019, and is part of the international steering committee for the 2024 TMS Specialty Congress.