Rick Ubic

Rick earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Materials Science from Case Western Reserve University and his PhD in Engineering Materials from Sheffield University in the UK.  After a two-year postdoctoral position there, he joined the faculty of Queen Mary, University of London.  In 2007 he was recruited by Boise State, where he is a professor in the Micron School of Materials Science & Engineering.  He has served as the director of the Boise State Center for Materials Characterization since 2012 and both director of the REU Site in Materials for Society and editor-in-chief of Materials Research Bulletin since 2014.  He received the ACerS 2003 Edward C. Henry Best Paper Award and the 2004 Robert L. Coble Award for Young Scholars for his “contributions relating crystallography to the behavior of dielectric properties in complex compounds.”  In 2017 he was awarded Boise State’s Foundation Scholar Award.  He has given 35 invited/plenary/keynote presentations at international forums in 12 countries on four continents.  He has authored 94 peer-reviewed articles plus three editorials and co-edited a two-volume work on microwave materials.  He joined ACerS in 1993 and the Electronics Division in 2003, serving as an officer in the division from 2014 – 2019 and as program chair of the EMA meeting in 2017 and 2018.  He also serves on the Publications Committee and chaired the Spriggs Phase Equilibria Award Subcommittee.  He has been a symposium co-organizer at MS&T since 2010 and at PacRim since 2011.  In 2014 he hosted the 8th International Conference on Microwave Materials & their Applications and remains an active member of the international advisory board of this conference series.

His work mainly involves structural characterization of electroceramics, structure-property relationships, and correlative modeling of perovskites, including the effect of vacancies, ordering, and noncubic distortions.