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 mechan ...

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 university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

. 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 Providenc ...

and received his PhD from

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

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 of ...

. He has received several awards, including the

Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (german: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung) is a foundation established by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and funded by the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of Education and Resea ...

and the

William Prager Medal The William Prager Medal is an award given annually by the Society of Engineering Science (SES) to an individual for "outstanding research contributions in either theoretical or experimental Solid Mechanics or both". This medal was established in ...

. 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 Sir John Macleod Ball (born 19 May 1948) is a British mathematician and former Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He was the president of the International Mathematical Union from 2003 to 2006 and a Fellow of ...

, he has served as one of the chief editors of the

Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis The ''Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis'' is a scientific journal that is devoted to research in mechanics as a deductive, mathematical science. The current editors in chief of the journal are Felix Otto and Vladimir Sverak. It was fo ...

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