Robert Cammarata of Johns Hopkins University remembered
- PDF / 1,863,717 Bytes
- 1 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 45 Downloads / 183 Views
Robert Cammarata of Johns Hopkins University remembered
R
obert “Bob” Cammarata, professor of materials science and engineering at Johns Hopkins University, died on Wednesday, January 13, 2016, at the age of 58. Cammarata served as chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins from 2003 until 2008. He had been a member of the Johns Hopkins Materials Research, Science, and Engineering Center and, more recently, the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute. He was affiliated with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, as well. Bob was “an insightful scientist, a talented teacher, a visionary entrepreneur, a mentor to students and colleagues, and a leader in the Johns Hopkins community,” said T.E. “Ed” Schlesinger, Dean of the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. Bob joined the Johns Hopkins Whiting School faculty in 1987 after completing a bachelor’s degree in materials science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a doctorate in applied physics at Harvard University, and subsequent postdoctoral research at MIT and IBM. At Johns Hopkins, he oversaw a vibrant research program for which he received significant external recognition, especially for his studies on the fundamental thermodynamics and mechanics of thin films. Bob became a full professor and chair of the Materials Science and Engineering Department just when biotechnology and nanotechnology concentrations began to take shape. He helped integrate these specialties with the fundamental understanding of the structures, energetics, kinetics, and mechanical behavior associated with materials and interface behavior, in which he was a renowned world leader. He authored some of the most authoritative reviews in these areas. He was elected a Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS) in 2011 and the American Physical Society
410
MRS BULLETIN
•
VOLUME 41 • MAY 2016
•
in 2012 for his pioneering contributions to the understanding of thermodynamics and mechanics of surfaces, thin films, and nanomaterials, and to the synthesis, processing, and mechanical behavior of nanocomposites. He was very active within MRS and was on the editorial boards of the Journal of Materials Research and MRS Bulletin for several years. Despite his deep scholarship and love for thermodynamics fundamentals, theory and modeling, and materials processing and mechanics, he was open to the wider applicability of his ideas. Most recently, building on a collaborative research project involving electrophoretic manipulation of nanowires, he founded the company NanoDirect with his PhD advisee, Stephen Farias, to commercialize efficient and cost-effective ways of separating semiconducting and metallic nanotube and nanowire objects. “He was really great and funny and, as a teacher, he was very good at taking complex thoughts and making them accessible to students. It was a real talent of his. Some professors would not take questions from students who were not in their class, but that was not the case with Bob,” said Farias. “You could ask him
Data Loading...
