Apelian is a Fellow of TMS, ASM, and APMI; he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the European Academy of Sciences, and the Armenian Academy of Sciences. He has over 700 publications to his credit, and 21 patents; and serves on several technical, corporate and editorial boards. During 2008/2009, he served as President of TMS. He served as Chair of the ASM Educational Foundation Board of Trustees (2016-2018).
Apelian’s research focus is materials processing, specifically in four distinct domains: alloy development; solidification processing; materials recovery, reuse, and recycling; and machine learning/deep learning in materials processing. He is credited with pioneering work in various areas of solidification processing, metal processing, powder metallurgy and digital manufacturing. He is the Founding Editor of the Journal of Sustainable Metallurgy.