The Mechanical Engineering Department is pleased to announce a new professorship, the Mehrabian Interdisciplinary Endowed Chair.  This Chaired Professorship was established by Robert and Victoria Mehrabian, longtime friends and benefactors of the UCSB College of Engineering, to support the scholarly activities of a faculty member jointly appointed between the Materials and Mechanical Engineering departments.

Professor Irene J. Beyerlein is the inaugural recipient of the Mehrabian Interdisciplinary Endowed Chair.  She is jointly appointed in the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Departments.  Her research is at the intersection of mechanics and materials, bringing together multiscale modeling, experimentation, and theory to guide the design of materials for target properties through control of microstructures through manufacturing processes. After receiving her Ph.D. degree in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell University in 1997, she began a postdoctoral appointment as a J.R. Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she remained on the scientific staff of the Theoretical Division until 2016. She has published one book, nine book chapters, and more than 290 peer-reviewed articles in the field of structural composites, materials processing, multiscale modeling of microstructure/property relationships, deformation mechanisms, and polycrystalline plasticity.  She is an editor for Acta Materialia and Scripta Materialia and an associate editor for Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering.  In recent years, she has been awarded the Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow’s Prize for Research (2012), the International Plasticity Young Researcher Award (2013), the TMS Distinguished Scientist/Engineering Award (2018), and most recently the Brimacombe Medal (2019) and the AIME Champion H. Mathewson Award (2019).

The Mehrabian Interdisciplinary Endowed Chair in Engineering is established through a generous gift from Robert and Victoria Mehrabian. Dr. Mehrabian served as Dean of the College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara from 1983 to 1990.  He transformed and expanded the College over those years and established the Materials Department in 1987.  His vision catalyzed a collaborative environment for faculty and advanced the College to international prominence.  Dr. Mehrabian is currently the Executive Chairman of Teledyne Technologies. He began his corporate executive career in July 1997 as senior vice president in charge of the Aerospace and Electronics segment of Allegheny Teledyne.  Dr. Mehrabian’s academic career spanned almost thirty years, starting at MIT in 1968 as an Assistant Professor and concluding as president of Carnegie Mellon University 1990 – 1997. Mehrabian moved to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) in 1975, where he was a Professor of Metallurgy and Professor of Mechanical Engineering from 1975 to 1979.  Following this, he spent four years in the Senior Executive Service of the U.S. Department of Commerce, first as the Chief of the Metallurgy Division of the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), and then as director of the Center for Materials Science, where he initiated numerous government/industry programs that became models for such cooperative efforts.