About the Chair Holder
David L. McDowell, Paden Chair Holder
David L. McDowell has a primary appointment in The GWW School of Mechanical Engineering and a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. He joined the Tech faculty in 1983 after receiving his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. McDowell is a 1979 B.S.M.E. graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Dr. McDowell has contributed substantially to nonlinear constitutive models for engineering materials, including cellular metallic materials, nonlinear and time dependent fracture mechanics, finite strain inelasticity and defect field mechanics, distributed damage evolution, shape memory phase transformations, deformation and damage of high temperature composites and heterogeneous alloys, combined computational and experimental strategies for modeling high cycle fatigue in advanced engineering alloys, multiscale computational mechanics of materials ranging from atomistics to continuum, and systems-based computational materials design to the development of experimentally based models for multiaxial cyclic plastic and thermoviscoplastic stress strain behavior of metals, small crack propagation laws for multiaxial fatigue, constitutive laws for creep fatigue environment interaction and thermomechanical fatigue, models for deformation induced anisotropy and damage evolution at finite strain, time dependent fracture mechanics modeling approaches for both creep ductile and creep brittle high temperature materials, and deformation and failure of materials used for applications ranging from gas turbine engines to electronic packaging to power plant components to helicopters to prosthetic devices for biomedical applications. His research support has come from industry (General Motors, Ford, Texas Instruments, American Foundrymen's Society, INTEL, United Technologies, General Electric, Pratt & Whitney) and government (Army, Air Force, DARPA, Navy, National Science Foundation, NASA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute) sources. Author of over 300 research articles, McDowell has advised or co advised over 60 graduate students.
McDowell teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in mechanical behavior of materials, continuum mechanics, computational materials science, nonlinear constitutive relations, fatigue, and nanomechanics and applications. As Chair of the Institute's Materials Council, McDowell provides leadership for the Institute's strategic materials thrust involving over 150 faculty from a broad cross-section of disciplines. A Fellow of the ASME, he has received of numerous engineering society awards for research and teaching, including the 1997 ASME Nadai Award, the highest distinction bestowed by the ASME Materials Division.
Dr. McDowell served as Editor of the ASME Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology from 1997-2002, and serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Plasticity, Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials and Structures, the International Journal of Damage Mechanics, Journal of Multiscale Computational Engineering, and Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures. He served as President of the Society of Engineering Science (SES) in 2002, and was elected Fellow of SES in 2006.
McDowell was named as Georgia Tech's Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor in 2000 for the period 1995-1999, in recognition of the accomplishments of his doctoral students who completed degrees during this period. He received the American Foundrymen's Society Team Award for development of fatigue models for cast Aluminum alloys in 2000 for the USCAR-AMD-DPO Project as part of a collaborative team effort (Sandia and Georgia Tech). In his role as a consultant to Sandia, he was a member of a 13 member team that developed Microstructure-Property Model Software that was selected by R&D Magazine as One of the 100 Most Technologically Significant New Products of the Year (2000).