James Rice to Receive the ASME Medal at the 2015 Honors Assembly

James R. Rice

ASME Fellow James R. Rice, Ph.D., is one of eight engineering innovators who will be recognized by ASME this year at the Honors Assembly, which will be held Nov. 16 during the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in Houston, Texas.

Dr. Rice, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Engineering Sciences and Geophysics at Harvard University, will receive the Society's highest award, the ASME Medal, during the ceremony. The medal, established in 1920, is awarded for eminently distinguished engineering achievement.

Rice is being recognized for his significant contributions to the field of applied mechanics, including the J-integral method in elastic-plastic fracture mechanics, which has been broadly applied in mechanical engineering and related disciplines. His pioneering concept have had a major impact on engineering practice and have led to new directions of research.

A leader in the applied mechanics field for more than 50 years, Rice has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1981. From 1965 to 1981, he was a faculty member of the Division of Engineering at Brown University. Beginning as an assistant professor at Brown, he was promoted to professor in 1970 and was named L. Herbert Ballou Professor of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in 1973.

During his tenure at the two universities, Rice has taught courses on a range of topics including solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, fracture mechanics, computational mechanics, hydrology and environmental geomechanics, soil mechanics, earthquake source processes, mechanics in earth and environmental science, differential equations and complex variable theory.

In recent years, Rice's work has focused on problems in the theoretical mechanics of solids and fluids — problems of stressing, deformation, fracture and flow — as they appear in seismology, tectonophysics and surficial geologic processes, and in civil and environmental engineering hydrology and geomechanics. These research areas have included fault zone shear processes, earthquake nucleation, tsunami propagation, meltwater interactions with glacier and ice sheet dynamics, landslide processes, and general hydrologic phenomena involving fluid interactions in deformation, flow and failure of earth materials.

His earlier research focused primarily on plastic deformation and cracking processes, principally in metals, as they occurred in mechanical and materials engineering, and on related computational and analytical methodology.

The ASME Foundation is the proud supporter of the ASME Honors and Awards program through the management of award endowment funds set up by individuals, corporations or groups. For more information on the special events scheduled to take place at the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, visit www.asmeconferences.org/Congress2015.