Friend named chair of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Washington University in St. Louis
Acclaimed researcher James Friend to join McKelvey School of Engineering in 2026
James Friend, the Stanford S. and Beverly P. Penner Endowed Chair in Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, has been named chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
Friend succeeds Philip V. Bayly, the Lee Hunter Distinguished Professor, who has been chair since 2008. Bayly led the department from what was then called Mechanical, Aerospace and Structural Engineering (MASE) into a thriving department with world-class research, many faculty-founded companies and significantly increased enrollment.
“I am thrilled that James will lead our Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science,” said Aaron F. Bobick, dean and the James M. McKelvey Professor. “McKelvey Engineering MEMS is in many ways a unique, interdisciplinary department with deep connections to medicine and biology, computational and experimental advances in materials, and innovative systems for microfluidics and thermal fluids. I expect James to harness the energy of the department and chart a course of even greater impact.”
Friend leads the Medically Advanced Devices Laboratory in the Center for Medical Devices at the University of California, San Diego. He is a professor in both the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering and in the Department of Surgery in School of Medicine. He also is the director of the Center for Medical Device Engineering and Biomechanics.
While at UC San Diego, he has served as vice chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, serves on a campus-wide committee for promotion and advancement, and has been rejuvenating the Center for Medical Devices and Biomechanics from a virtual center into a laboratory and fabrication-facility-based center in support of five junior School of Medicine clinical faculty and about a dozen Jacobs School of Engineering Faculty. He raised roughly $500,000 in six months of service for the Center on a path to raise $5 million.
“I am humbly honored to return to Missouri and join Washington University in St. Louis as chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science,” Friend said. “I have a vision for extending the department’s excellence in research, education and innovation into the future, and look forward to working with the fine faculty, staff and students of WashU to make this our shared achievement.”
His research explores and exploits acoustic phenomena at small scales for primarily biomedical applications. He has more than 270 peer-reviewed research publications, 34 issued patents, 25 provisional patents, and has been awarded more than $31 million in competitive grant-based research funding from such agencies as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Office of Naval Research.
Two of his patents are responsible for Sonocharge Energy, a startup company founded and run by one of Friend’s former doctoral students. Friend is a senior adviser to the company, which closed Series A funding in May 2024. Friend co-founded Latchability Inc. in 2024 based on a patent-pending integrated microtechnology and machine learning algorithm to quickly identify infant breastfeeding issues to improve breastfeeding rates as well as maternal and infant health. He has founded or co-founded several other companies since 2019 to license and use his acoustofluidic and endovascular fluidic actuator inventions.
Friend began his career at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs before spending 14 years as a faculty member in Japan and Australia, where he founded a micro/nanofabrication facility at Monash University in 2005-2007 and helped to found the $45 million Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication from 2007-2010. From 2011-2014, he was a vice-chancellor's senior research fellow, professor and the inaugural director of the MicroNano Research Facility at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Melbourne, Australia, a $35 million, 12,000 square foot cleanroom and biolab before joining UCSD in November 2014.
A Missouri native, Friend earned a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering and master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering all from the University of Missouri, Rolla, now the Missouri University of Science & Technology. He received the Young Alumni Award from Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2011.
Among Friend’s numerous awards include research and teaching awards from the Monash Faculty of Engineering in 2006, 2008 and 2011, respectively; a Future Leader award from the Davos Future Summit in 2008; a Top 10 emerging scientific leader of Australia by Microsoft and The Australian newspaper award in 2009; an award as the corresponding author of one of the top 50 papers of the past 50 years of Applied Physics Letters in 2012; and the IEEE Carl Hellmuth Hertz Ultrasonics Award from the IEEE in 2015 before being named a fellow of the IEEE in 2018. He was named as a highly cited author (top 5%) by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2020 and received UCSD’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2021.