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Regents’ Professor and Carter N. Paden, Jr. Distinguished Chair in Metals Processing, Dave McDowell joined Georgia Tech in 1983 and holds appointments in both the GWW School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. He served as Director of the Mechanical Properties Research Laboratory from 1992-2012. In August 2012 he was named Founding Director of the Institute for Materials (IMat), a Georgia Tech interdisciplinary research institute charged with cultivating cross-cutting collaborations in materials research and education and developing the materials innovation ecosystem. Serving as IMat Director through 2020, McDowell oversaw the development of centralized campus materials user facilities and broad efforts to develop and incorporate integrated materials data science and informatics approaches in materials research. He was named in 2019 as recipient of Georgia Tech’s Class of Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, Georgia Tech’s highest annual award bestowed on a faculty member for sustained outstanding achievement in teaching, research, and service.
McDowell's research focuses on the development of physically-based, microstructure-sensitive constitutive models for nonlinear and time-dependent behavior of materials, with emphasis on wrought and cast metals. Topics of interest include finite strain inelasticity and defect field mechanics, microstructure-sensitive computational approaches to deformation and damage of heterogeneous materials, with emphasis on metal fatigue, atomistic and coarse-grained atomistic simulations of dislocations, dynamic deformation and failure of materials, irradiation effects on materials, and multiscale modeling with methods for uncertainty quantification. He has contributed to schemes for computational materials science and mechanics to inform systems design of materials (Integrated Design of Multiscale, Multifunctional Materials and Products, Elsevier, 2009, ISBN-13: 978-1-85617-662-0) and served as co-editor of one of the first comprehensive volumes on Uncertainty in Multiscale Modeling (eds. Y. Wang and D.L. McDowell, Elsevier, 2020, 900 pages, ISBN: 9780081029411). Applications of interest span lightweight structural materials, materials for hot sections of aircraft gas turbine engines, titanium alloys, ferritic and austenitic alloys, and nanocrystalline materials, among others. His record consists of over 500 papers authored or co-authored, over 500 presentations, and more than 80 graduate students advised or co-advised.
Dr. McDowell currently serves on the editorial boards of npj:Computational Materials and Journal of Multiscale Modeling. He served as co-Editor of the International Journal of Fatigue from 2007-2020, the highest impact factor journal in this research subject. He is a Fellow and Past President (2002) of the Society for Engineering Science, and is a Fellow of ASME, TMS, and ASM International. In 2020 he was elected as an Honorary Member of AIME.
Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983 M.S., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1981 B.S., University of Nebraska, 1979
A. International or National Awards
B. Institute or School Awards
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