Department of Materials Science and Engineering

MSE Chair to Assume National Leadership Post

 

Dr. Mufit Akinc, chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University, has been elected vice chair of the University Materials Council (UMC), the official organization of department chairs, heads, and directors of materials science and engineering programs in the United States and Canada.

Election as UMC vice chair automatically puts Akinc in line to assume the position of UMC chair-elect next year, after which he will be designated chair of the organization. He was elected to the UMC Executive Council in 2002. Besides conducting surveys that benchmark enrollments, degrees awarded, faculty salaries, research funding, and graduate student stipends, the UMC serves as a forum to share best practices in areas such as student recruitment, academic accreditation, emerging research, and patent rights policies in the field of materials science.

Dr. Akinc received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemistry from the Middle East Technical University (METU) in his native Turkey in 1970 and 1973, respectively, and his Ph.D. in ceramic engineering from Iowa State University in 1977. He has taught in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Kansas State University and the Department of Chemistry at METU, where he retains an appointment as an adjunct professor. He also served as materials science curriculum chair for the National Technological University between 1998 and 2003.

Akinc joined the faculty of the Iowa State MSE department in 1981 and was named chair in 1995. Under his leadership, the department has risen to become one of the nation's premier programs in materials science. MSE faculty on average graduate twice as many PhD students as other departments in the Iowa State College of Engineering, and the department's programs account for nearly one-third of the college's research dollars, or $15 million annually.

A specialist in the processing of structural and functional materials, with a primary emphasis on materials used in energy generation, storage, and transformation, Akinc is particularly interested in the synthesis, processing, and characterization of novel materials for high-temperature structural applications.

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