The Distinguished Life Member grade of Society membership is the Society’s most prestigious level of membership and is awarded in recognition of a member’s contribution to the ceramics profession. The Constitution of the Society states: “Distinguished Life Members shall be current members of the Society of professional eminence who, because of their achievements in the ceramic arts or sciences, or their service to the Society, are elected to such membership by the Board of Directors.”
You must be an ACerS member to nominate someone. Two sponsors are required.
Award Winners
John E. Marra
From his first day at the NYS College of Ceramics, John Marra was destined to be a ceramic engineer. John joined the American Ceramic Society as a first-year student and has been a dedicated member since then. From earning his BS and PhD degrees in ceramic engineering through his ever-increasing responsibilities at SRNL and the Department of Energy, John’s loyalty to ACerS has been unwavering. It is fitting that his most highly cited paper, based on his PhD research, was published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society. The nature of his responsibilities over his long career, both technical and managerial, did not give him the opportunity to publish much on his own, but the programs and research teams that he built and managed led to advances in waste management and nuclear materials processing that have greatly benefited the nation. The present strength and vitality of our Energy Materials and Systems Division owe much to the hard work that John and his colleagues put into the Division thirty years ago. Likewise, the decisions that John and his contemporaries made twenty years ago to overhaul the structure and finances of ACerS helped the Society regain its footing and so guarantee the future that we enjoy today. Since serving as ACerS President, John’s career has led him to manage nine figure programs and to advise agency and political figures responsible for some of the nation’s most important technologies, but even now, John remains the ceramic engineer that he always was, promoting our profession and those who pursue it, and always supporting the Society he once most ably led.
Subhash Risbud
Subhash Risbud is a widely respected materials scientist with a long history of distinguished achievements spanning a multidisciplinary range of academic and industrial research contributions that have notably advanced the field of nano and biomaterials. Following undergraduate studies in materials science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, he obtained an M.S. degree at Berkeley in 1971 followed by three years of hands-on experience in crystal growth at the Stanford Center for Materials Research (1971-1973) and slurry making and tape casting at GTE Sylvania (1973-74). After returning to Berkeley, he completed his Ph.D. working on phase separation and metastable liquid immiscibility. His academic career started in Fall 1976 and he rose rapidly through the ranks to achieve tenure at the University of Illinois-Urbana and full professorship at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1985. A prolific author, Professor Risbud and his students have published over 300 publications and six U.S. patents. For over four decades he has been the Principal Investigator on government and industry funded projects and in 1994 The W.M. Keck Foundation awarded him a $ 600,000 grant to create a campus wide NMR facility, the first Keck award on the Davis campus.