Fundamentals of Ceramics

Prof. Michel W. Barsoum is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University. As the author of two entries on the MAX phases in the Encyclopedia of Materials Science, and the book MAX Phases published in 2013, he is an internationally recognized leader in the area of MAX phases. In 2011, he and colleagues at Drexel, selectively etched the A-group layers from the MAX phases to produce an entirely new family of 2D solids that they labeled MXenes, that have sparked global interest because of their potential in a multitude of applications. He has authored the book MAX Phases: Properties of Machinable Carbides and Nitrides, published by Wiley VCH in 2013. He has published over 450 refereed papers, including ones in top-tier journals such as Nature and Science. According to Google Scholar his h-index is >100 with over 44,000 citations. He made ISI’s most cited researchers list in 2018 and 2019. He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, a fellow of the American Ceramic Society and the World Academy of Ceramics. The latter awarded him the quadrennial International Ceramics Prize 2020, one of the highest honors in the field. In 2000, he was awarded a Humboldt-Max Planck Research Award for Senior US Research Scientists and spent a sabbatical year at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2008, he spent a sabbatical at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the prestigious Wheatly Scholar. He has been a visiting professor at Linkoping University in Sweden since 2008. In 2017, he received a Chair of Excellence from the Nanoscience Foundation in Grenoble, France. He is co-editor of Materials Research Letters, published by Taylor & Francis.