Austin joined the Fatigue and Fracture group in December 2025 as part of an award from the NRC Research Associateship Program to pursue the codification and advancement of quantitative texture analysis (QTA) techniques. His interests revolve predominately around crystallographic analysis of EBSD, TEM, and 4D-STEM datasets, but past work has included finite element modeling, abnormal grain evolution, high speed deformation models, an non-euclidean statistical models.