Class of 1942 Term Professor: Peter Davies	Print Issue
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Peter Davies has been named the Class of 1942 Term Professor. Dr. Davies joined Penn Engineering in 1983 in the department of materials  science and engineering. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1975 and a master’s degree in 1978, both from Oxford University and a doctoral degree in 1981 from Arizona State University. Dr. Davies serves as the chair of the department of materials science and engineering, a role he has performed with distinction through successive re-appointments since 2002. He is a member of the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM) and the Penn Center for Energy Innovation. Dr. Davies is a dedicated teacher, having won both the School’s top teaching honor, the S. Reid Warren Jr. Award for Distinguished Teaching (Almanac April 29, 2008) and the University’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (Almanac April 21, 1998).

Dr. Davies’ principal research interests lie in the design and nanolevel structure characterization of functional inorganic solids. He is an expert in the synthesis, crystal chemistry and properties of electronic ceramic materials and has published seminal papers on the influence of nanoscale atomic ordering on the properties of ceramic resonators used in wireless communications. He has also engineered new high response ferroelectric and piezoelectric materials. In his most recent work, Dr. Davies discovered the first family of inorganic materials that self-assemble into periodic, phase-separated, nano-checkerboard structures.

The Class of 1942 Term Chair was established to recognize Penn faculty members who have made significant contributions to both scholarship and undergraduate teaching. The chair rotates every five years among Penn’s four undergraduate schools (Arts and Sciences, Engineering and Applied Science, Nursing and Wharton).