By Sammy Miles, Managing Editor-in-Chief of CORROSION journal

AMPP’s 2026 Willis Whitney Technical Achievement Award recipient is Dr. Nick Birbilis. In his 25+ year career, he has worked in several corrosion-related areas, including monitoring, remediation, life prediction, asset design, durability management planning, and the development of corrosion-resistant materials.

Dr. Birbilis has described his career as having "one foot in industry and one foot at the lab bench."

As part of the 2026 AMPP Annual Conference + Expo, his on-site award lecture takes place at 9:00 a.m. local time on Tuesday, March 17. Held inside room 350 DEF of Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center, his remarks will focus on work within advanced characterization, alloy development, emerging technologies, and field application.

Hailing from Melbourne, Australia, Dr. Birbilis has been an AMPP member for 25 years and an AMPP fellow since 2014. In a recent AMPP podcast episode, Dr. Birbilis discussed his career with enthusiasm. Starting with his first project, he stated that he “realized [studying corrosion] is hands on and corrosion is a combat sport. And I really, really love that. It’s very different to other [types] of engineering…. I’ve almost felt like a doctor—not a doctor of medicine, but a doctor of structure.”  

Each year, the Whitney Award is presented to someone who has shown, “sustained excellence in corrosion that’s had a big impact on the corrosion field,” according to Dr. John Scully, Chair of the Whitney Award Task Force. Dr. Birbilis has done precisely that and is recognized as a thought leader in a number of areas of corrosion research, from nanostructure to artificial intelligence.  

If you would like to learn more about this year’s Whitney Award winner, listen to the recent podcast episode with Lucrezia Scoppio (AMPP Awards Program Committee Chair), Dr. Scully, and Dr. Birbilis.

The complete list of AMPP’s 2026 award recipients is available here.