Faculty Profiles
James R. Friend
Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Faculty-Affiliate, Calit2
Micro- and nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS) and devices. Ultrasonics and nonlinear and physical effects of sound at the micro and nano scale. Medical microdevices. Acoustoelectric effects and surface acoustic waves (SAW) in piezoelectric materials. Biomedical instrumentation and transducers.
Friend’s research covers fundamental and applied studies on the interaction of electromechanical fields in novel materials and across solid-solid, fluid-solid, and fluid-fluid interfaces at the micro and nano scale. The applications of this research are principally oriented towards biomedical needs. His team created several medical technologies, including a new pulmonary drug and stem cell delivery system and a remote microrobotic guidewire navigation system for improving neurointervention outcomes in treating stroke and aneurysms. He has over 240 peer-reviewed publications and 25 patents and patent applications.
Capsule Bio:
James Friend leads the Medically Advanced Devices Laboratory in the Center for Medical Devices at the University of California, San Diego. He holds the Stanford S. and Beverly P. Penner Endowed Chair in Engineering and is a professor in both the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Jacobs School of Engineering and the Department of Surgery, School of Medicine.
He spent 14 years abroad as a faculty member in Japan and Australia before returning to the US. His research interests are principally in exploring and exploiting acoustic phenomena at small scales, mainly for biomedical applications. He currently supervises a team of 7 PhD students. Over the years, he has published over 350 peer-reviewed research publications, with 205 journal papers and 9 book chapters (H-factor = 61), and has 30 granted patents, completed 42 postgraduate students and supervised 23 postdoctoral staff, and been awarded over $37 million in competitive grant-based research funding.
He most recently helped found Latchability(R) LLC, an infant health diagnostics company, GlideNeuro, an endovascular intervention technology company, and Sonocharge Energy, a rapidly rechargeable battery company which has grown to a valuation of $70M. Among other awards, he received UC San Diego's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2021, was noted as a highly cited author of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2020, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry from 2022, a Fellow of the IEEE from 2018, a Keck Fellow in 2018-21, and was awarded the IEEE Carl Hellmuth Hertz Ultrasonics Award from the IEEE in 2015.
