Sabyasachi Sen Named Chair of Materials Science and Engineering
Professor Sabyasachi Sen has been named the new chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Davis. Sen will begin his term on July 1, 2025.
"I firmly believe that the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, anchored in its inherently interdisciplinary nature, holds a vital and distinctive role within the College of Engineering," Sen said. "As the incoming chair of the department, I look forward to nurturing this role and fostering an increasingly collaborative research environment — one that strengthens our partnerships with other departments across the college and advances our shared goals."
Sen became interested in natural glasses formed during volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts while pursuing his Master of Science degree in geological sciences at the University of Houston. After a short stint at Princeton University studying thermodynamic measurements on glasses and glass-ceramics, he went on to Stanford to study glass structure and relaxation phenomena using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopic techniques, earning his Ph.D. in 1996 and completing a postdoctoral fellowship in 1997.
After briefly serving on the faculty in the Department of Physics at Aberystwyth University, Wales, Sen worked in industry as a senior scientist at Corning Inc., developing glasses for long-distance telecommunication and flat panel displays.
He joined the UC Davis Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 2004. Sen served as the department vice chair in the past and has held the Blacutt-Underwood Professorship in Materials Science since 2020.
Sen's current research interests include the development and application of state-of-the-art spectroscopic and rheological techniques to study atomic structure and dynamical phenomena in amorphous and crystalline matter.
He has authored and co-authored a total of 280 scientific papers on glasses and ceramics and is the recipient of several national and international awards in glass science, including the 2020 Otto Schott Research Award, which recognizes global research excellence in the fields of glass and glass ceramics.