Mahajan will help steer ambitious agenda

Professor Subhash Mahajan has been appointed Technical Fellow in ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. The new role, created by ASU President Michael Crow, is reserved for faculty members demonstrating both significant technical achievements and leadership.

In the position, Mahajan will provide expertise to help advance an ambitious agenda for progress in research and faculty development, says Deirdre Meldrum, the dean of the engineering schools. Mahajan will help build research teams and work to strengthen relationships with government funding agencies. He also will develop a strong junior engineering faculty through mentoring efforts.

Mahajan is a Regents’ Professor – the highest title given to faculty at Arizona’s state universities – and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He also serves on several of the academy’s committees.

He has received some of the most distinctive national and international awards both for pioneering research in materials science and as an educator in the field. He is internationally recognized for his studies on structure-property relations in functional materials and deformation behavior of solids and has published extensively on these topics, and is coordinating editor for the three leading journals in materials science and engineering. His writing includes the undergraduate textbook "Principles of Growth and Processing of Semiconductors."

Mahajan joined ASU in 1997 and was chair of the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering from 2000 to 2006 and then founding director of the School of Materials through June 2009.

Many of the junior engineering faculty he hired during those years later earned the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for young faculty members.