Invited Speakers

Honor Lectures

Professor Robert O. Ritchie
Dept Materials Science & Mineral Engineering
University of California at Berkeley

Robert O. Ritchie is the H.T. & Jessie Chua Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Chairman of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley; he is also a Senior Faculty Scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in physics/metallurgy from Cambridge University (1966-1973) and the Sc.D. degree in 1990. He is known for his research in fracture mechanics and fatigue, having published over 550 papers and edited 19 books in the literature. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the U.K.

Professor James R. Rice
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University

James R. Rice has been a professor of engineering sciences and geophysics at Harvard University since 1981; previously he was at Brown and, for his education, at Lehigh. His work of recent years is on geomechanics, especially on the science of earthquakes, including fault friction and the nucleation and propagation of earthquake ruptures, and pore fluid interactions in deformation and failure of earth materials. His earlier work has addressed elastic-plastic crack propagation, path-independent integrals in elasticity, wave effects in crack dynamics, microscopic mechanisms of fracture, thermodynamics of embrittlement, inelastic constitutive relations for solids, deformation localization into shear zones, and landslide processes.