In 2018 he was appointed Fellow of the American Vacuum Society (AVS). Since 2020 he is the Delegate for Materials Science at the Austrian Science Fund. In 2022 he was elected as a corresponding member to the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2023 he won the Bill Sproul Award of the AVS for his seminal contributions to materials-science-based guidelines for improved thermal stability, strength and toughness of nitride and boride based thin films.
Paul Mayrhofer has pioneered age hardening within ceramic thin films and is fascinated by phase transitions in general. His research activities focus on developing nanostructured materials by a combination of computational and experimental material science.