About
Robert O. Ritchie is the H.T. & Jessie Chua Distinguished Professor of Engineering, Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Senior Faculty Scientist in the Materials Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and an affiliated member of the UCSF/UC Berkeley Bioengineering group. He was Chairman of the UC Berkeley Materials Science & Engineering Department from 2005 to 2011.
Dr. Ritchie is well known for his research in the fields of materials science, fracture mechanics and particularly fatigue, having authored or co-authored over 800 papers and edited 19 books in the technical literature; he has a citation “h-index” of 115 on Web of Science [125 on Scopus, 1491 on Google Scholar]). He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Foreign Member Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in the U.K., and a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He has also been the recipient of numerous other awards, including the Journal of Engineering Materials & Technology Best Paper Award from the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 1979, the Marcus A. Grossmann Award from the American Society for Metals (ASM) in 1980, the Most Outstanding Scientific Accomplishment Award from the U.S. Department of Energy in Metallurgy in 1982 and in Ceramics in 1989, the Champion H. Mathewson Gold Medal from the Metallurgical Society of AIME (TMS) in 1985, the George R. Irwin Medal from the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) in 1985, the E-9 Award for the Best Presented Paper on Fatigue from ASTM in 1986, the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) in 1987, the Rosenhain Medal from the Institute of Materials (London) in 1992, the Structural Materials Distinguished Materials Scientist/Engineer Award from TMS in 1996, the ASTM Journal of Testing and Evaluation Award for Most Outstanding Article in 1998, the Nadai Medal from ASME and the ASTM Fatigue Lectureship in 2004, the Wöhler Medal from European Structural Integrity Society in 2006, the A. A. Griffith Medal from the Institute of Materials (London) in 2007, the Sir Alan Cottrell Gold Medal from the International Congress on Fracture and Alexander von Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award in 2009, and the Institute of Metals/Robert Franklin Mehl Award from TMS, the Edward DeMille Campbell Memorial Lectureship Award from ASM, the A. Cemel Eringen Medal from the Society of Engineering Science in 2010, the David Turnbull Award from the Materials Research Society (MRS) in 2013, the Acta Materialia Gold Medal and the Klaus Halbach Award for Innovative Instrumentation in 2014, the Morris Cohen Award from TMS in 2017, the William D, Nix Medal from TMS in 2020, and the Gold Medal from ASM in 2021.
