Professor Alexandra Navrotsky has built an extraordinary career asking fundamental questions about how materials form and behave in extreme environments. She combines fundamental thermodynamic principles with elegant thermophysical property measurement techniques to understand and model interesting problems, especially those that are far from equilibrium. [1] Many important industrial processes, for example steelmaking, glassmaking, and petrochemical cracking, are high-temperature processes that occur far from equilibrium, and they rely on refractory ceramics to contain these harsh industrial processes. Because refractories fill a vital role in achieving sustainable manufacturing, improving efficiency, reducing CO2 emissions, adapting to hydrogen fuels, adapting to new high-performance alloy compositions, and more, the refractory industry offers straight-to-the-bottom line opportunities for engineers to impact today’s grand challenges. However, the industry competes for talent with emerging materials science technologies, and it suffers from an outdated perception as a dusty, staid industry. The American Ceramic Society and the Ceramic and Glass Industry Foundation have taken on the challenge of raising the visibility of this “invisible” industry and of presenting the industry as an innovative discipline that solves urgent problems with global impact. As a result, hundreds of thousands of prospective and working ceramic and glass engineers have been presented with Prof. Navrotsky’s challenge to “Think big, bold, and hot!”