Professor earns materials research honors


Arizona State University professor Subhash Mahajan has been selected as a Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS).

Mahajan is the Technical Fellow in Materials Science and Engineering with Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. MRS is one of the leading professional organizations in the field, with more than 15,000 members in the United States and 80 other countries.

Fellow status recognizes engineers and scientists for “their distinguished research accomplishments and their outstanding contributions to the advancement of materials research worldwide.”

Mahajan was specifically noted by the society for “pioneering research on defects in solids, structure-property correlations in semiconductors, magnetic materials, and materials for light-wave communications, and for the successful mentoring of students and faculty members.”

New society Fellows will be formally announced April 7 at the MRS spring meeting in San Francisco.

Mahajan was nominated by colleague Jagdish (Jay) Narayan, who holds the John C. C. Fan Family Distinguished Chair in Materials Science at North Carolina State University and is director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures.

“Subhash Mahajan is well deserving of this highly prestigious honor,” Narayan says. “He is widely recognized for seminal contributions in defects and structure-property correlations of solid state materials.

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 has won some of the most distinctive national and international awards both for leading research in materials science and as an educator.

He helps edit three leading journals in materials science and engineering and is author of the 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 former School of Materials through June 2009.