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Education

  • Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University, 2005
  • M.S., The Pennsylvania State University, 2002
  • Diplôme d’Ingénieur, MINES ParisTech, 2000

Background

Professor Pierron was a senior engineer at Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc. (San Jose, CA) before joining Georgia Tech in 2007 as an assistant professor. He is the recipient of the 2013 NSF CAREER Award, the 2014 Hetenyi Award (for Best Research Paper published in the journal Experimental Mechanics), the 2013 CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, and the 2017 Sigma Xi Best Ph.D. Thesis Advisor Award.

Teaching Interests

Professor Pierron teaches a wide range of fundamental courses at the undergraduate (Statics and Dynamics of Rigid Bodies, Thermodynamics, Mechanical Behavior of Materials) and graduate (Fracture Mechanics, Fatigue of Materials) levels.

Research Interests

Professor Pierron’s research program focuses on small-scale mechanical testing, a critical part of materials research for discovering nanoscale phenomena in modern technological applications or for enabling minimally invasive approaches to collect mechanical data from bulk materials. His group has pioneered several advanced, small-scale, in-situ mechanical testing techniques to investigate the mechanical properties (plasticity, creep, fatigue) of a wide range of materials, including metals, ceramics, and polymer composites. The scientific contribution of this research is to understand the fundamental degradation mechanisms of materials and the associated size and environmental effects at the nano- and micro-scales.

Recent Publications