Pioneer of flash-sintering and professor Rishi Raj honored for storied career
By Sailesh Menon, Project Administrator of the NSF PIRE grant for work on Polymer Derived Ceramics; Professor Rishi Raj is a co-PI on this grant.
Those in attendance included Alexandra Navrotsky, member of the National Academy of Sciences; Raj N. Singh, member of the National Academy of Inventors; and David Marshall and Ray Baughman, members of the National Academy of Engineering among other academics.
Rajendra Bordia was one of several former students invited to present at the symposium. He is now a professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Clemson University.
Bordia said two lessons he has learned from Raj are to have fun doing research and making lasting professional friendships and to treat your research group as family.
Venkatraman Gopalan, another former student who is now a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University also spoke well of the lessons he had learned from Raj.
Raj thanked the organizers and those in attendance, including his wife, Jyotsna and many of his colleagues and friends from Cornell and Harvard.
About Professor Rishi Raj
Raj received a BS from Allahabad University in India in 1961 in pure sciences and later a BS in electrical engineering from University of Durham in England with first-class honors and two prizes. After working for a year, he pursued a PhD at Harvard. In 1970, he graduated with a PhD in engineering and applied sciences under the tutelage of Mike Ashby and David Turnbull.
In 1972, Raj became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at ²ÊÃñ±¦µä, but in 1975, he accepted a position as professor of materials science and engineering at Cornell University in Ithica, New York. Raj worked at Cornell for 21 years until he moved back to Boulder and has been employed as a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering ever since.
Raj’s research is focused in two areas: flash sintering and high-temperature ceramic matrix-composites from polymer derived ceramics (PDCs). Flash sintering was discovered in Raj’s lab in 2010. He is currently working on a National Science Foundation Partners for International Research and Education (PIRE) grant on PDCs.
Throughout his storied career, Raj has published more than 375 peer-reviewed articles in revered international journals with over 20,000 citations of his work on Google Scholar.
Raj has supervised the doctoral thesis of more than 60 PhD students as well as approximately 20 postdoctoral research associates and 25 MS thesis students. For the last 45 years, an average of three undergraduates per year have gained laboratory experience under his guidance.