James Friend

James Friend leads the Medically Advanced Devices Laboratory in the Center for Medical Devices at the University of California, San Diego, a professor in both the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Jacobs School of Engineering and the Department of Surgery, School of Medicine.

He is the Stanford S. and Beverly P. Penner Endowed Chair in Engineering.

He spent 14 years abroad as a faculty member in Japan and Australia before returning to the US, having founded one micro/nanofabrication facility at Monash University in 2005-7, helping to found another—the $45 million Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication—over 2007-10, and serving as a Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow, Professor, and the inaugural director of the MicroNano Research Facility at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia from 2012–14, a $35 million, 12,000 sqft. cleanroom+biolab before joining UC San Diego in November 2014.

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 and 1 post-doc. Over the years, he has over 270 peer-reviewed research publications (H-factor = 54) and has 25 issued patents, 15 patents in process, completed 37 postgraduate students and supervised 23 postdoctoral staff, and been awarded over $29 million in competitive grant-based research funding.

He received an AIAA Jefferson Goblet Student Paper Award and an ASME Best Paper of Conference Award for a single talk at the AIAA/ASME/AHS/ASC/ASCE Structural Dynamics & Mechanics Conference in 1996; excellence in teaching, early career research, and research 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. He received UCSD’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2021.