Less than a year after Alp Sehirlioglu came to the United States to start his graduate studies, he attended the American Ceramic Society’s 1999 conference and gave his first poster presentation, which focused on sol-gel coating of piezoelectric particles. Having not had similar conferences to attend in his native Turkey, he was enthralled to meet “big names” in the ceramic industry whose names he knew from papers. That same year, Sehirlioglu, now an Associate Professor in Case Western Reserve University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, joined the Society as a student member, and more than twenty years later, he has been named an ACerS Fellow.