The A. James Clark School of Engineering named Professor Ichiro Takeuchi as the new chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), home to the #24 undergraduate program in the nation with $26.6 million in research expenditures and fruitful relationships with many neighboring industrial labs and federal research laboratories. 

During his time as the interim chair, Takeuchi’s steady leadership kept the department moving forward, an early demonstration of the commitment and initiative of his tenure. 

“I am honored to be named the chair of MSE at Maryland, where I spent the last 26 years working closely with so many friends, students, and colleagues. With a renewed sense of responsibility, I very much look forward to continuing the exciting collaborative journey with everyone to take the department to the next level,” said Takeuchi. 

Takeuchi has a long history with MSE, joining the faculty in 1999, and serving as the director of graduate studies from 2015 to 2024. His research centers around combinatorial high-throughput strategies for materials exploration and discovery, machine learning for materials science, elastocaloric cooling, and superconducting materials and devices. 

“Ichiro’s steady leadership as interim chair has kept the department moving forward, giving us a preview of the commitment and initiative we can expect during his tenure,” said Samuel Graham Jr., dean of the Clark School. “We’re excited for Ichiro to continue MSE’s track record of academic excellence, impactful research, and students who are primed to innovate for the public good.”

Among his peers, he is generally recognized as having pioneered combinatorial high-throughput materials strategies as well as elastocaloric cooling. Those achievements have been recognized with our university’s Invention of the Year Award (Physical Sciences Category) in 2010 and our school’s Senior Faculty Research Achievement Award in 2018. He was also named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in 2018, and is a fellow of the Materials Research Society, American Physical Society, and the Japan Society of Applied Physics. 

The new chair also has the industry experience and connections to expand the Clark School’s partnerships, and benefit its students and research enterprise. Currently, he is the Chief Technology Officer of Maryland Energy & Sensor Technologies (MEST), LLC, a start-up dedicated to commercializing elastocaloric cooling technology. He also spent four years at NEC Laboratories in Japan, working on superconducting thin films and devices. 

Takeuchi earned a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1987 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland in 1996. He was a postdoctoral associate in the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1996 to 1999. He holds affiliate appointments in the University of Maryland’s Departments of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering.