Robert O. Ritchie

Biosketch

Robert O. Ritchie, MA, PhD, ScD is the H.T. & Jessie Chua Distinguished Professor in Engineering and former Chair of the Materials Science & Engineering Department (MSE) at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his MA, PhD and ScD degrees at Cambridge University in the UK. Before first coming to Berkeley to be a Miller Research Fellow in 1974, he was the Goldsmith’s Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College Cambridge (1972-74) where he was a post-doc in Materials Science. He joined the Faculty at MIT in 1977 where he became the Class of 1922 Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering. He returned to Berkeley in 1981 where he is a Professor in the MSE and Mechanical Engineering Departments, and Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a foreign fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, AAAS and NAS in the US. He is also a Fellow of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and the Academy of Athens in Greece. He has been President of the International Congress on Fracture (ICF), and is a recipient of several awards, including the ASTM George R. Irwin Medal, the ICF Alan Cottrell Gold Medal, the MRS David Turnbull Award, the the ASM Gold Medal, the TMS William D. Nix Award, and the Acta Materialia Gold Medal.

Research Interests

Dr. Ritchie's research has been focused on the mechanics and mechanisms of deformation and primarily fatigue and fracture of a broad range of materials, from metals, ceramics, intermetallics, polymers and composites to biological and natural materials, such as bone, teeth, skin, hair and fish scales; he has also interested and has designed methodologies for the mechanical endurance of medical prosthetic devices such as heart valves and endovascular stents. He is known for developing one of the first fracture-mechanics based mechanistic modes of fracture, the so-called Ritchie, Knott & Rice (RKR) model of cleavage fracture, and for his early work on the mechanistic and microstructural aspects of fatigue crack propagation in metals and ceramics, in particular involving the role of crack-tip shielding. With respect to natural materials, he developed high toughness bioinspired ceramics based on seashells, and provided an increased understanding of the role of fracture mechanics on the damage-tolerance of bone. This provided a means to understand the mechanical effects of diseases such as diabetes, Osteogenesis Imperfecta and vitamin D deficiency. More recently his interests have been centered on the mechanical and microstructural effects of high-performance structural materials, notably the damage-tolerance of the new multiple principal elements alloys (commonly referred to as high-entropy alloys), and to understand the mechanistic reasons why some of these alloys can exhibit truly remarkable properties, such as the highest fracture toughness measured to date.