Under the pseudonym John West, John Ågren and Ulf Westblom wrote the western novel Du ska dö (1974). Ågren was previously also active in the Swedish science fiction fandom and wrote in collaboration with Ulf Westblom, among other things, the novel Porten till evigheten (1976); later, in 1982–1987, he was part of the editorial staff of the magazine Nova science fiction.

 

Ågren received his doctorate in 1981 on a thesis on computer simulations of diffusion processes in steel alloys. He was for a number of years head of department at the department of metallography and in his research has worked above all with thermodynamic data models and diffusion in alloys. This is important for prognosticating the material's strength and other properties. He has been a member of the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences since 2006.

 

Professor John Ågren is the recipient of the 2011 Hume-Rothery Prize.

 

In 2017, John Ågren was also awarded the NIMS prize, awarded by the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science. He shared the prize with researchers Bo Sundman and Kiyohito Ishida.

 

In 2018, Agren was elected into the National Academy of Engineering for the development of integrated thermodynamics and kinetics analysis tools enabling computational materials engineering.

 

According to Google Scholar, Ågren's scientific publication has (2020) over 11,000 citations and an h-index of 56.