Don M. Lipkin was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025, the first alumnus of the UCSB Materials Department to be so-recognized. He is currently Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, with a courtesy appointment in Aerospace Engineering. Lipkin did his doctoral research on metal-ceramic interfaces, working with Professors A.G. Evans and D.R. Clarke.
Lipkin joined GE Research in 1996, where he built a distinguished 27-year career. He led the Structural Materials Laboratory in 2000-06 and was Senior Principal Scientist from 2018 until his move to Texas A&M in 2023. Lipkin is widely recognized as a superb Materials engineer with the creativity and skill to effectively implement fundamental knowledge into important technologies. He has made enabling contributions to multiple critical technologies, ranging from high power targets for X-ray tomography, sustainability of strategic materials, and most notably gas turbines for aircraft propulsion and power generation. Dr. Lipkin’s contributions to the latter are widespread, ranging from materials to component design, to novel processing approaches and even to inspection and repair technologies. Arguably his most notable contributions arise from his leadership in the development of environmental barrier coatings (EBCs) that enabled the introduction of ceramic matrix composites into service in commercial aircraft engines. This is a major milestone in high temperature materials technology, comparable in impact to the introduction of superalloy single crystal airfoils in decades past. While EBC details are highly proprietary, Lipkin’s contributions to thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) and bond coatings for metallic components are widely known. Particularly notable is his work on ion plasma deposition technology, that have been instrumental in developing combinatorial synthesis approaches to identify bond coat formulations with improved resistance to morphological instabilities, alternates to platinum alloying, and most recently the identification of Co-based alloys with g-g’ microstructures and suitable intrinsic oxidation resistance. Lipkin also made seminal contributions to describe the kinetics of decomposition of TBCs based on YSZ and their subsequent susceptibility to disruptive transformations on cooling, a problem that has long been known to set an ultimate limit to their durability. This has been invaluable not only in providing a foundation for life-prediction models in long term applications, e.g. power generation turbines, but also as a benchmark for alternate TBC compositions. At TAMU, his research focuses on high-performance structural materials for extreme thermochemical environments. This includes alloy and coating design, advanced synthesis and manufacturing, high-temperature physical property measurements, and high-enthalpy/high-heat-flux testing to enable durable turbine and hypersonic components.
Throughout his career Lipkin contributed substantially to maintain the tradition of GE Research as one of the preeminent industrial laboratories worldwide. Evidence of the value of his contributions is reflected in the Aviation Engineering Excellence Award, the Blodgett and the Dushman awards from GE, as well as the 2019 TMS Application to Practice Award and his election to the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology in 2025. Lipkin is also an exemplary member of the profession, mentoring students in technologically relevant research through internships, collaborating with academics in productive research programs linking science to industrial practice, and serving his professional community in organizing workshops that promote the communication between industry and academia. Notably, Lipkin has mentored 9 students of UCSB faculty, two of whom are now tenured faculty at Minnesota and Illinois.
