Materials Science Essentials

James F. Shackelford, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of California, Davis, holds BS and MS degrees in Ceramic Engineering from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University in Canada, he joined UC Davis, where he served as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Engineering and later as Director of the University Honors Program, supporting students across diverse disciplines. Dr. Shackelford also contributed as Associate Director for Education at the NSF-funded Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology (CBST) and as Faculty Assistant to the Director of the McClellan Nuclear Research Center (MNRC). His teaching and research focus on the structural characterization and processing of materials, with particular emphasis on glasses and biomaterials, and he has been actively exploring online teaching technologies. A Fellow of both the American Ceramic Society (since 1992) and ASM International (since 2011), he has received numerous accolades, including the Outstanding Educator Award (1996) and Distinguished Teaching Award (2003) from UC Davis, along with the College of Engineering’s Outstanding Teaching Award (2012) and the Continuing and Professional Education Outstanding Service Award (2014). An accomplished author with over 100 archived papers and books, his widely adopted textbook, Introduction to Materials Science for Engineers, now in its 8th Edition, has been translated into multiple languages, including Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.