Mas Subramanian

Mas Subramanian is a solid-state chemist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, and currently holds the Milton Harris Chair Professor of Materials Science in the Department of Chemistry. His work in solid-state chemistry on functional inorganic materials has led to the improvement of materials, devices, and the fundamentals of structure-property relationships.

Mas received his B.S. in Chemistry, A.C. Tech, from the University of Madras, in 1975 and received a M.S in Solid State Chemistry from the same university in 1977. In 1982 Mas completed his Ph.D in Solid State Chemistry on pyrochlore oxides at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, under the guidance of Professor G. V. Subba Rao. The introduction to his thesis is a pyrochlore review that remains his most cited work to date. From 1982-1984 he was a Post Doctoral Fellow under the guidance of Abraham Clearfield at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.

Mas's continued work on pyrochlores during his post doctoral appointment. He was later hired at the E.I. duPont de Nemours Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware. He was eventually appointed as a DuPont Research Fellow. In 2004 he was awarded the DuPont Charles Pedersen Medal Award for Excellence in Scientific and Technical Achievement, named after Charles J. Pedersen. His work on fluoraromatic synthesis is one of his most notable achievements. In 2006 he left DuPont to join Oregon State University as the Milton Harris Chair Professor of Materials Science. He was also appointed as Signature Faculty Fellow for the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI). He was awarded the Chair of Excellence at Laboratoire CRISMAT (Caen, France 2007-2009), and remains an Adjunct Professor, Laboratoire de Chimie du Solide du CNRS and Institut de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Bordeaux (University of Bordeaux, France 1993–present).

Mas has authored more than 300 research publications and holds 54 patents. He was appointed as the chair of the 2010 Gordon Research Conference on Solid State Chemistry and has participated in organizing 5 international conferences including ACS, MRS, EMRS and APS. He is the Editor for North America for the Solid State Sciences and Progress in Solid State Chemistry journals, and has served on the editorial boards for the Journal of Materials Chemistry (1995-2001), Chemistry of Materials (2000-2006), Materials Research Bulletin (2006–present), and the Journal of Solid State Chemistry (2009–present). He is listed as having the most cited article in Solid State Sciences, and has the 2nd most cited article for two journals: Progress in Solid State Chemistry and the Journal for Solid State Chemistry. In addition, he has published more than 30 scientific articles since his arrival at Oregon State University, and received the Ralf Busch Materials Science Seminar Award in 2007.

Dr. Subramanian's research is dedicated to the design and synthesis of novel functional materials with contradicting properties for emerging applications in energy conversion and electronics. His focus has been on structure-property relationships in pigments, thermoelectrics, high-temperature superconductivity, magnetoresistivity, solid fast ion conductors and high-K dielectrics. He currently holds research projects in each of these fields at Oregon State University. In 2009, his team discovered a new durable blue pigment, YInMn Blue.