Our Department's 50 Years of Growth and Development
by James Shackelford and Subhash Risbud (updated by Yayoi Takamura)
Though the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at UC Davis has only existed since 2016, materials science and engineering research and teaching has a long and prestigious history at the university.
Birth and development
The materials science and engineering curriculum was established within the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 1969 under the leadership of Professor Amiya Mukherjee, who taught its first 14 courses, starting in 1966. Professor Zuhair Munir joined the program in 1972. A formal Division of Materials Science and Engineering was created within the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 1980 (with the faculty by that time comprising of Mukherjee, Munir and James Shackelford), and the department title was later expanded to the Department of Mechanical, Aeronautical and Materials Engineering (MAME).
By 1993, the Division of Materials Science and Engineering had grown to the size of seven faculty members and moved to the Department of Chemical Engineering, forming the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (CHMS) with Subhash Risbud serving as vice chair from 1993-96 and Chair from 1996-2002.
Reconstitution
The synergism between Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, especially at the graduate level, grew in a variety of ways for nearly two decades, but in 2013, the faculty began to consider the reconstitution of CHMS into two separate departments. Following a number of discussions and a formal faculty vote, a reconstitution proposal was submitted to the UC Davis Academic Senate in 2014. Formal approval for the reconstitution was received in March 2016, thus creating the current Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
Materials Science and Engineering at UC Davis has been an ABET-accredited program since 1990 and underwent a successful comprehensive review in the 2018-19 academic year. The MSE undergraduate program complements a strong graduate research effort that provides project-based M.Eng., thesis-based M.S., and Ph.D. degrees.
World-class faculty
The ranking of a program rests largely on the reputation of its faculty. From the beginning, the MSE faculty at UC Davis have been well-recognized within the field, and that recognition continues to grow. Mukherjee and Munir have received the UC Davis Prize for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. Mukherjee also received the Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the Distinguished Mentoring Award.
Six current faculty members have received early-career awards from NSF, DOE, DARPA and Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) (Klaus van Benthem, Seung Sae Hong, Roopali Kukreja, Erika La Plante, Scott McCormack, and Yayoi Takamura), and most are fellows of at least one professional society and/or have received awards from a professional materials society. Two of our emeriti are members of the National Academies (Subhash Mahajan and Alexandra Navrotsky).
Our faculty members are also highly active in organizing national and international meetings and publishing related proceedings, monographs and handbooks. Several faculty have also served as editors of materials science journals, and Shackelford’s textbook, Introduction to Materials Science for Engineers, has been translated into seven languages and is in its ninth edition.
A recent decade-long survey of research publications from the faculty indicated an average of six archived publications annually per faculty member, consistent with top-rated peer institutions across the country.
The future
The MSE department is committed to excellence in both research and teaching, shown by hiring Susan Gentry as a full-time lecturer in 2015. Since the reconstitution, the department continues to expand in size and prestige, adding Roopali Kukreja in 2016, Jeremy Mason in 2017, Scott McCormack and Marina Leite in 2019 and Seung Sae Hong in 2020, Amir Saeidi, Erika La Plante, and Mingwei Zhang in 2023.
The Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Davis has grown dramatically in the 50 years since its birth in the Mechanical Engineering department. Today, the department has an internationally-recognized faculty known for their cutting edge research and teaching excellence. Continued growth of students and faculty is on the horizon as the department moves into a new and exciting phase of making fresh strides in the education of future generations of materials scientists and engineers.