Subhash H. Risbud

SUBHASH H. RISBUD

Subhash Risbud is a widely respected materials scientist with a long history of distinguished achievements spanning a multidisciplinary range of academic and industrial research contributions that have notably advanced the field of nano and biomaterials. Following undergraduate studies in materials science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, he obtained an M.S. degree at Berkeley in 1971 followed by three years of hands-on experience in crystal growth at the Stanford Center for Materials Research (1971-1973) and slurry making and tape casting at GTE Sylvania (1973-74). After returning to Berkeley, he completed his Ph.D. working on phase separation and metastable liquid immiscibility.  His academic career started in Fall 1976 and he rose rapidly through the ranks to achieve tenure at the University of Illinois-Urbana and full professorship at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1985. A prolific author, Professor Risbud and his students have published over 300 publications and six U.S. patents. For over four decades he has been the Principal Investigator on government and industry funded projects and in 1994 The W.M. Keck Foundation awarded him a $ 600,000 grant to create a campus wide NMR facility, the first Keck award on the Davis campus.

Risbud and his group work on sol-gel processing of a variety of biological and amorphous materials and he has developed worldwide collaborations on projects ranging from biophotonics, nanotechnology and computer modeling to environmental effects on human health. Parallel with outstanding teaching and research, his administrative repertoire was enriched as he took on leadership roles in the College of Engineering (Department Chair) and the campus-wide Designated Emphasis on Biotechnology (DEB) graduate groups serving as a NIH Faculty Trainer and member of the advisory board of the Advanced Degree Program (ADP) for Corporate Employees. During his term as Chair he actively sought diversity by recruiting eight faculty (four of whom are women) and worked with Deans of other colleges to promote cross-college appointments. He encouraged faculty to form multidisciplinary teams from academia, industry, and national laboratories and led efforts to write proposals for centers of excellence. He was a founding member of the NSF MRSEC Center for Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies (CPIMA) involving investigators from the Stanford-UC Davis-IBM. From 2005 to 2014 he served as the Director of the Internship and Career Center (ICC) at UC -Davis. Beyond success with traditional research support from NSF, DOE, DARPA, and industry, he promoted fund-raising efforts by inspiring staff in the Internship and Career Center to write a successful NIH-STEER grant for training future engineers for the U.S. workforce.  By pioneering numerous research interactions on processing of materials, he has nurtured healthy working relationships with industries, universities and national laboratories. His worldwide reputation has led to several honors and awards including the 2020 Kingery Award from the American Ceramic Society, Distinguished Engineering Educator Award from the Engineers’ Council in 2019,  and election to the World Academy of Ceramics in 2014.