Dr. Veerle Keppens is currently an assistant professor in the material science and engineering department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She graduated in 1995 from the K. U. Leuven (Belgium), where she studied the low-temperature properties of amorphous solids using ultrasonic attenuation and velocity measurements. From 1995 to 1998 she was a Fulbright fellow in the novel materials group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she became interested in the elastic properties of new materials. In 1998 she received a Humboldt-fellowship to do research at the Institut fuer angewandte Physik in Heidelberg. She was a member of the Ole Miss faculty from 1999-2003.