Faculty
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Rick Ubic, Ph.D.
Professor
About Rick Ubic
Bio
Prof. Ubic’s background is in Materials Science. He obtained both his Bachelors (1993) and Masters (1994) degrees in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Case Western Reserve University.  He earned his PhD (1998) from the University of Sheffield, England where he stayed on for two subsequent years as a post-doctoral research associate.  He arrived as a lecturer (assistant professor) at Queen Mary, University of London at the end of 1999 and was promoted to senior lecturer (associate professor) in 2005. In 2007 he moved to Boise State University where he is now a professor in the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering. He has served as the Director of the Boise State Center for Materials Characterization (BSCMC) since 2012 and Director of the REU Site in Materials for Society since 2014.
He has received several awards, including the 1998 Berthold Eichler Memorial Prize from G.R. Stein Refractories Ltd., the American Ceramic Society’s (ACerS) 2003 Edward C. Henry Best Paper Award for his high-resolution TEM work on defect pyrochlores, the ACerS 2004 Robert L. Coble Award for Young Scholars for his “contributions relating crystallography to the behavior of dielectric properties in complex compounds,” and the 2006 Edgar Andrews Best Journal Article Prize for his work on the structure of a perovskite superlattice. In 2017 he was the recipient of Boise State’s highest honor for research, the Foundation Scholar Award.
Prof. Ubic is a member of the Electron Microscopy and Analysis Group of the Institute of Physics. He is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society and served the Society as past chair (2018-19) of the Electronics Division and member of the Publications Committee (2017-2021). He has been Editor-in-Chief of Materials Research Bulletin since 2014. He has co-organized symposia at the MS&T conference series since 2010 and at PacRim since 2011. In 2014 he hosted the 8th International Conference on Microwave Materials & their Applications (MMA 2014) and remains an active member of the international advisory board of this conference series.
His work mainly involves structural characterization of graphite and electroceramics; structure-property relationships; hybrid perovskite photovoltaics; and correlative modeling of perovskites, including the effect of vacancies, ordering, and noncubic distortions.