Clive A. Randall

Clive A. Randall is a Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and has served as Director of Materials Research Institute at The Pennsylvania State University since 2015.

Prof. Randall received a B.Sc. in Physics in 1983 from the University of East Anglia, and a Ph.D. in Experimental Physics from the University of Essex in 1987, both in his native United Kingdom.  He came to Penn State in 1987 as a Research Associate to work with the Ferroelectrics group, becoming Senior Research Associate in 1992, an Associate Professor in 1994 and became a full Professor 1999.  He became Director for the National Science Foundation Center for Dielectric Studies (1997-2013) and grew the center to international recognition with a team of excellent colleagues, staff, and students. In 2013, the center was restructured, and he formed the Center for Dielectrics and Piezoelectrics as a Co-Director until 2016; he still serves as Technical Advisor.  He has authored/co-authored over 500 technical papers and 14 patents, with over 26,000 citations, all in various aspects across the field of electroceramics.   Prof. Randall has been awarded several honors, including election to World Academy of Ceramics (2006); he received the IEEE UFFC-S Ferroelectrics Recognition Award (2014).  He was made honorary Fellow of the European Ceramic Society and the IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2019).  As an active member of American Ceramic Society, he was honored with the American Ceramic Society Fulrath Award (2002) and elected Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (2005).  He and his coauthors received the Spriggs Phase Equilibria Award (2008) and he gave the Friedberg Lecture at the American Ceramic Society (2011).  He received, along with his students, the Edward C. Henry Best Paper of the Year twice from the American Ceramics Society Electronics Division (2012 and 2016). His research ranges from material processing, defect and crystal chemistry, material physics and electrical properties of a broad number of electroceramics, but with a particular focus on dielectrics and piezoelectrics and their behavior under extreme conditions. His investigations of the fast firing of base metal capacitors were adopted by the major manufacturing, as it enabled superior control of microstructure, stoichiometry, and electrical performance of high capacitance multilayers, with now trillions of components being manufactured with this strategy annually. His group also developed electrical methods that have been used to accelerate development of highly reliable capacitors and are used as a quality control screen method. His group has also discovered and developed new families of electroceramic materials, including high frequency dielectrics, high temperature piezoelectrics, and high energy density dielectrics. He also introduced a numbers of novel processing methods for fabricating bulk nanocomposites, including dielectrophoretic assembly of ceramic polymer composites, and more recently, the introduction of the cold sintering process. His group has also contributed to the fundamental understanding of the nature of polarization in ferroelectrics and related materials, size effect phenomenon, and defect dynamics in dielectric materials.