Dr. George M. Pharr

Chancellor's Professor, McKamey Professor of Engineering,
MSE Department Head, and UT-ORNL Joint Faculty

Ph.D., Stanford (1979): Nanoindentation, small-scale mechanical behavior, mechanisms of deformation and fracture in solids

Brief Bio

George M. Pharr received his BS in Mechanical Engineering at Rice University in 1975 and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford in 1979. After one year of postdoctoral study at the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge, England, he returned to Rice in 1980 as a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. During a sabbatical leave in 1987-88, he worked with the Ceramic Sciences Group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. He moved to his current joint position at UT/ORNL in 1998 and has been head of the UT Materials Science and Engineering Department since 2006. He received ASM International’s Bradley Stoughton Award for Young Teachers of Metallurgy in 1985 and was elected a Fellow of ASM International in 1995. His honors also include the Amoco Award for Superior Teaching at Rice University in 1995 and the University of Tennessee Chancellor's Award for Research and Creative Achievement in 2004.   He has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society since 1990 and served as Volume Organizer for the MRS Bulletin in 2000. He has chaired or co-chaired many large professional society meetings including the 1995 Spring Meeting of the Materials Research Society in San Francisco  and the 2000 Gordon Research Conference on Thin Film Mechanical Behavior, which he co-founded in 1998. He is an author or co-author of more than 180 scientific publications, including 4 book chapters, and a Thomson ISI "Highly Cited Researcher in Materials Science". His research focuses on nanoindentation and small-scale mechanical behavior of materials.

Location: Ruffner Hall, G004C, from 4-5 pm, refreshments at 3:30