Richard D. James (born 1952) is a

mechanician A mechanician is an engineer or a scientist working in the field of mechanics, or in a related or sub-field: engineering or computational mechanics, applied mechanics, geomechanics, biomechanics, and mechanics of materials. Names other than mech ...

and materials scientist. He is currently the Russell J. Penrose Professor and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. T ...

. He was educated at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Provide ...

and received his PhD from

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consiste ...

under the direction of J.L. Ericksen. James is known for his research in

phase transitions In chemistry, thermodynamics, and other related fields, a phase transition (or phase change) is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic states o ...

. He has received several awards, including the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award and the William Prager Medal. More recently, the

ASME The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) is an American professional association that, in its own words, "promotes the art, science, and practice of multidisciplinary engineering and allied sciences around the globe" via "continuing ...

awarded him the

Koiter Medal The Warner T. Koiter Medal was established in 1996 by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It is awarded in recognition of distinguished work in the field of solid mechanics. The award was funded by the Technical University of Delft in th ...

for "..pioneering the modern vision of phase transformations and materials instabilities in solids, explaining how microstructures form and evolve, and demonstrating how to take advantage of this to design new active materials". With John M. Ball, he has served as one of the chief editors of the Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis.

External links

Faculty page
at the University of Minnesota. * https://files.asme.org/Divisions/AMD/16261.pdf

References

Living people American materials scientists 1952 births Brown University alumni Johns Hopkins University alumni {{physicist-stub