William D. Nix

Professor Nix is the Lee Otterson Professor of Engineering (Emeritus) at Stanford University; he has been teaching in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford since 1962 and served as Chairman of that department in the early 1990s. He holds honorary degrees from the Colorado School of Mines, the University of Illinois and Northwestern University. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his teaching and research from the various professional societies to which he belongs. These include the ASM Gold Medal, the Albert Sauveur Achievement Award from ASM, Acta Metallurgica Gold Medal, the von Hippel Award from the Materials Research Society and the Heyn Medal of the German Society of Materials Science.  He is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences and he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is principally concerned with the relation between structure and mechanical properties of materials in both thin film and bulk form and is also engaged in research on the mechanical properties of materials for lithium-ion batteries.  He is co-author of 450 publications in these and related fields and he has trained 79 Ph.D. students in these subjects in his years at Stanford.  Professor Nix has taught courses on dislocation theory and mechanical properties of materials and is co-author, with Wei Cai of Stanford, of a new textbook entitled “Imperfections in Crystalline Solids,” to be published this year by Cambridge University Press.