Regina Ragan

Professor, Materials Science and Engineering
Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Co-Director, Institute for Design and Manufacturing Innovation
Education and Outreach Director, Center for Complex and Active Materials – an NSF MRSEC

Bio:
Ragan is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER Award and a Fulbright Fellow. She is co-Director of the Institute for Design and Manufacturing Innovation and Education Director for the Center for Complex Active Materials (CCAM – an NSF MRSEC). She received her B.S. summa cum laude in Material Science and Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology where she was awarded as a NSF, Bell Laboratories, and Intel Fellow. As postdoctoral scholar in the Information & Quantum Systems Laboratory at Hewlett Packard, Ragan worked on emerging technologies including molecular electronics that provided fundamental understanding leading to memristors, a resistive RAM technology. Since joining the Faculty at UC Irvine, she began a research effort in self-assembly as she foresaw this would play a vital role in (nano) manufacturing of nanoscale devices and pioneered methods for assembling colloidal metal nanoparticles into photonic devices, a nascent research area a decade ago. Her activities include investigating and gaining fundamental understanding material platforms capable of assembling at scale, integration in device architectures, and connecting architecture design with device performance.