Amiya Mukherjee, a University of California, Davis, engineering professor internationally recognized for his pace-setting research and dedicated teaching in the materials science field, has been awarded the 1993 UC Davis Prize for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement -- believed to be the largest of its kind in the country. Established by the UC Davis Foundation through gifts of the Davis Chancellor's Club Fellows, the $25,000 prize pays tribute to faculty members on campus who demonstrate skillful undergraduate teaching and remarkable scholarly accomplishments. No other academic institution in the United States is believed to honor this combination of achievements with such a high monetary prize. "This prize permits the UC Davis Foundation to recognize and to encourage the ideal blend of scholarship and mentorship among the campus's faculty," said James A. Willett, chair of the foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports UC Davis. "Amiya Mukherjee is an extraordinarily gifted and dedicated teacher and a distinguished scholar, who shows us so well how fully our faculty members can engage themselves in the education of their students," said UC Davis Chancellor Theodore L. Hullar. "Amiya Mukherjee has won numerous teaching and research awards; this recognition by the campus is highly gratifying," said M.S. Ghausi, dean of the College of Engineering. A recent visit to an undergraduate engineering class revealed many of the characteristics that students applaud in their evaluations of Mukherjee. Broadcast simultaneously to students at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Monday class opened with Mukherjee filling one-third of the chalkboard with hints on an upcoming homework assignment. As he discussed concepts and filled the board with equations during the late afternoon class, he scanned the faces of students, looking for the glazed eyes and yawns that cue him to change the rhythm with an endearingly bad joke or by provoking a free-wheeling discussion. "Sometimes, in such a situation, I am capable of planting deliberate errors, mostly conceptual and not mathematical in nature, and then of joining the class in a community hunt to locate the errors," Mukherjee said. Mukherjee knows his students. Early in the term, to personally involve students in the class, he randomly memorizes names of 10 students so that he will be able to target a question, often surprising the individual he names. Even then, it is as important to Mukherjee that he learn the correct pronunciation of names in an often culturally diverse class as it is for the student to come up with the correct answer. (Note: His name is pronounced oh-MEE-yo MUKE-er-gee.) Mukherjee emphasizes that learning doesn't stop at the classroom door. In fact, it barely begins there. Outside of his regular office hours, he schedules special one-on-one sessions with individuals and often conducts extra review sessions in advance of major exams. Videotapes of his classes are available for later viewing, reference volumes are placed on reserve at the physical sciences library, and his home phone regularly rings with students eager to discuss some new idea. "His enthusiasm is contagious," said Susan L. Stoner, a materials scientist at Livermore who credited Mukherjee's inspiration as influential in her recent career switch from mechanical engineering to materials science. "Working over the TV link, he went out of his way to make me feel a part of the class. I never had a professor so concerned about me and my career." Teaching extends into research and may be inseparable from it, according to Mukherjee. "One function imperceptibly merges into the other, and much of the research involving students is a learning process, which happens to take place outside the standard classroom setting," said Mukherjee. "Research enriches teaching by giving us new ideas and perspectives, and it keeps our minds fresh." "Mukherjee has developed a unique synergy between teaching and research that places research at the center of his teaching effectiveness," said Wasyl Malyj, a former master's degree student and now chief development engineer for the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory on campus. In his undergraduate days in the 1950s, Mukherjee was more likely to be found in the Himalayas with a backpack, hammer and field glasses pursuing his geology studies. Upon graduating with honors from the University of Calcutta, Mukherjee, influenced by the social unrest in India, he rejected a well-paying management job in the mining industry. Instead, impressed by the application of engineering principles, he decided to work in a huge integrated steel plant, which took in raw iron ore at one end, produced iron and then steel, fabricated machine and body parts and rolled out locomotive engines on the the other end. He soon moved to the birthplace of the steel-making industry, Sheffield, England, where he spent a year as a management trainee in a steel factory before he was drawn back into academia at the University of Sheffield. He continued his studies at the University of Oxford with a predoctoral fellowship. In the early 1960s, he moved to Berkeley to work at what was called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, so focused and excited about his work in the fledgling U.S. space program that he only noticed the local student protests when they appeared on the nightly television news. After a one-year experimental stint in a private research institute, he joined the faculty at UC Davis in 1966, when there was only one course in materials science and no materials science program. During the intervening 26 years, he helped develop, along with his colleagues, a materials science and engineering curriculum, four double-major curricula, a separate Division of Materials Science and Engineering and a robust graduate program. He initiated and taught 14 new courses in this program. "The heart of our materials science program was literally created by Amiya single-handedly," said Jim Shackelford, associate dean of the College of Engineering and a professor of materials science. "He is one of the most charismatic instructors on our campus, and his high degree of productivity has made him a world leader in his research field." Mukherjee's creative research, lucid style and new insights during the past three decades have earned him some of the highest research and teaching honors among his materials science peers, nationally and internationally. Among his colleagues, Mukherjee is known for one of the first few truly successful efforts to quantitatively integrate microscopic mechanisms into equations that explain macroscopic behavior. This method is used extensively for identifying various high-temperature deformation mechanisms. In his research and in his teaching, he has continued to explore the premise that understanding the behavior of materials starts at the microstructural level. For example, the failure of towering bridges or tiny silicon chips invariably begins at the microscopic level, and it is at that level that he encourages his students to start asking some of their questions. Some of Mukherjee's research efforts these days are devoted to exploring creep and superplasticity in new materials -- metals and ceramics formed by a relatively inexpensive one-step process borrowing from plastics manufacturing to produce a complex, lightweight part that can operate at high temperatures and under high-stress conditions, such as in gas turbine engines. Originally used in military and aerospace applications, Mukherjee's work may help make the materials more cost-effective and attractive for a wider range of civilian uses. In the past three years, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Livermore and several industrial firms have granted more than $1 million and much laboratory equipment to support Mukherjee's research. His research projects and graduate students are spread out over the state: three students at Livermore, one at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, two at Sandia National Laboratory, two at Aerojet General Corp. in Sacramento, one at UC Berkeley, seven graduate students and three postdoctoral fellows at UC Davis, and a cooperative research program at the Rockwell Science Center in Southern California and at the UC San Diego Institute of Applied Mechanics. David Farkas, a doctoral student returning to school after 21 years of active duty in the U.S. Navy, appreciated Mukherjee's personal involvement and individualized tutoring in preparation for his Ph.D. preliminary exams and help in easing the transition back into school. "Professor Mukherjee has treated me not as a student, but as a colleague in academia," Farkas says. "He already calls me 'Dr.'" The UC Davis Prize for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement was established in 1987 through a gift from an alumnus who asked to remain unnamed. Nominations for the prize are made by the deans of UC Davis colleges and schools offering undergraduate education. The committee that made the final selection was composed of representatives from the UC Davis Foundation, the Davis Division of the UC Academic Senate, the Associated Students of UC Davis and Chancellor Hullar.