Kevin Hemker

Kevin Hemker is the Alonzo G. Decker Chair and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and holds joint appointments in the Departments of Materials Science & Engineering and Earth & Planetary Sciences.  He earned a BS in metallurgy from the University of Cincinnati, MS and PhD degrees in materials science and engineering from Stanford University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in physics at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. He joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 1993, was an NSF National Young Investigator (1994), an invited Professor at the EPFL (1995) and the University of Paris XIII (2001), and received the ASM Materials Science Research Silver Medal in 2001. He served as Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (2007-2013) and editor of Scripta Materialia (2004-2011).  He was a member and Vice-Chair of the DARPA Defense Science Research Council (2010-2014), and is currently a member of the HRL Technical Advisory Group, the SRI Technology Council and President of The Minerals, Metals, Materials Society (TMS).  Hemker has been named Fellow of AAAS, ASME, ASM International and TMS.

Hemker has mentored approximately 75 postdoctoral fellows, doctoral and masters students since coming to Hopkins, more than 15 of whom now have tenured or tenure-track academic positions in major research universities (U Penn, UIUC, UCSB, Tohoku U, U Freiburg, TAMU, etc.).  His group strives to elucidate the underlying atomic-level details that govern the mechanical response, performance and reliability of disparate material systems.  They have made key observations and discoveries that have challenged the way the community thinks about and understands materials behavior in:  additive manufacturing, nanocrystalline materials, materials for MEMS, metallic micro-lattices, thermal barrier coatings for satellites and gas turbines, armor ceramics, extreme environments, and high temperature structural materials in general.  The results of their research have been disseminated in approximately 250 scientific articles, 4 co-edited books and over 300 invited presentations and plenary lectures.