Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Rajan Joins MSE Faculty in Combinatorial Discovery

 

Krishna Rajan comes to the department after 18 years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where he established the nation’s first program in materials informatics. He brings that pioneering spirit—along with an NSF research center—to MSE, where he’s looking forward to joining Iowa State’s combinatorial sciences initiative.   Dr. Rajan is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the development and use of combinatorial discovery methods for the investigation of new materials.  He is the director of the National Science Foundations International Materials Informatics Collaboratory, an international research and education center promoting the use of informatics and combinatorial experimentation for materials discovery and design.    Dr. Rajan received his BASc in metallurgy and materials science from the University of Toronto and ScD in materials science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He was also a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University.  He served as a research scientist with the National Research Council of Canada in the 1980s.  While at Rensselaer he held visiting appointments at a number of leading institutions worldwide, including the NRC Eastern Europe Fellowship at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the CNRS visiting professorship at the University of Rennes in France, and at Germany’s Max Planck Institute.  In addition to his groundbreaking work in materials informatics, Dr. Rajan is an expert in high-resolution electron microscopy and the nanostructural characterization of materials, with additional research interests in the microstructural evolution of materials.  He has given more than 250 scientific lectures and presentations before various scholarly bodies, written 180 articles appearing in refereed journals, authored six book and encyclopedia chapters, and has served as editor for 13 monographs and conference proceedings.

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