Professor one of decade’s best researchers

The field of materials science has taken Challapalli Suryanarayana, a professor at the UCF College of Engineering, around the world and recently has been ranked among the top 100 researchers of the past decade.

Suryanarayana has been ranked No. 40 by Thomson Reuters, formerly known as the Institute for Scientific Information, out of a pool of more than 500,000 materials scientists and is currently ranked No. 21 among scientists living in the United States.

Materials science is a wide field. It involves elements of physics and chemistry, dealing with the fundamental properties, characteristics, and structures of materials. Thomson Reuters ranks their list by selecting the top researchers in their respective fields based on                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 the quality of their research publications as well as the number of times their works have been cited.

Suryanarayana has conducted multiple projects, including more than 20 technical books and 300 academic research papers, revolving around researching mechanical alignments, nanostructure materials and the production of new forms of technology. His reviews have also been cited more than 1,700 times.

Suryanarayana's decision to enter the field of materials science occurred during the 1960s in his home-country of India, where steel plants were industriously being built as the field of materials science began to rapidly grow.

Suranarayana received his Ph.D. in Metallurgical Engineering from Banaras Hindu University and, prior to coming to UCF, he worked at the Institute for Materials and Advanced Processes at the University of Idaho as their senior associate of the National Research Council.

Suryanarayana gives his own collegiate academic advisor, Professor T.R. Anantharaman, great respect as it was him who challenged to "be bold" and explore areas not known or discovered. Now Suryanarayana uses this principle to encourage his own students.

"There is so much more to be done [in the materials science field] that you will be able to make a big impact," he said.

Over the past decade Suryanarayana has found the materials science field to be very unified. He has been able to travel across the world and incorporate many other fields of science into his research projects.  

"Nanoscience is a classic example of every type of science coming together in an interdisciplinary structure," he said.

The research conducted by Suryanarayana has brought him to facilities in multiple nations, where the use of sophisticated machinery is more typically available and cheaper to use than it is in the United States. Suryanarayana researched the special properties of bulk metallic glass at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, where he also spent one year as a visiting professor.

From this research, Suryanarayana produced a book on bulk metallic glasses — the first book of its kind that was easily assessable. He has also researched mechanical alignment powder metallurgy at Helmut-Schmidt University in Hamburg, Germany, as well as researching rapidly solidified materials at Chungnam National University in South Korea.

Suryanarayana has received many honors and awards over his career, including the ASM-IIM Lectureship Award, the Pandya Medal from the Indian Institute of Metals, and the National Metallurgists Day Award from the Government of India.

His proudest moment was back in 1975 when he was handed the Indian National Science Academy's Young Scientists Medal from the then-Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, herself.

Suryanarayana, who has been at UCF for 10 years now, finds his students as his sense of motivation.

"Every semester, I see new bright faces which are a source of inspiration and encouragement," he said. "My greatest joy is when students come and tell me when they learn something new. I feel the purpose of faculty is to encourage students to learn."

Suryanarayana's projects in materials science have been used in a vast variety of resources, including in the aerospace industries and environmental biomaterial research, in addition to the nanotechnology field.

"Everyone deals with materials — it doesn't matter if you're a scientist or not. You could be a homemaker," Suryanarayana said. "If we are able to produce materials that are better than they are today, then I feel very useful. This is what a materials scientist can do."