Kelly Nygren is the lead staff scientist at the Structural Materials Beamline (SMB) at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), combining her passion for understanding the performance of current and next-generation engineering alloys with applied problems. Kelly earned her BS in 2011 and PhD in 2016 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Materials Science and Engineering. In her graduate work, she examined deformation and fracture pathways of engineering alloys in extreme environments. Her postdoc at the University of Wisconsin Madison extended these studies into corrosion and radiation degradation of alloys. She joined the Cornell community as a CHESS postdoc seeking to bridge mechanistic understandings from electron microscopy with macroscopic models using synchrotron X-ray diffraction. In her current role, she continues to combine these complementary modalities to target fundamental mechanisms of deformation in polycrystalline alloys, especially under fatigue and extreme conditions.