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Lori Federico
lori.federico@chbe.gatech.edu
Summary Sentence: William Nix recognized for “notable contributions to the motivations and encouragement of research through education.”
Full Summary: No summary paragraph submitted.
William D. NixProfessor William D. Nix has been selected as the winner of the 2017 Sigma Xi Monie A. Ferst Award. This national award is sponsored by the Georgia Institute of Technology Chapter of Sigma Xi and is given annually to an educator in engineering or science who has made “notable contributions to the motivations and encouragement of research through education.” Its purpose is to “recognize significant contributions to scientific research by an educator in engineering or science.”
Professor Nix is joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1963 and was appointed Professor in 1972. As a distinguished faculty member who excelled in both teaching and research, he was named the Lee Otterson Professor of Engineering at Stanford in 1989, served as Chairman of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering from 1991 to 1996, and became Professor Emeritus in 2003. During his tenure at Stanford, he was awarded honorary doctorate degrees from the Colorado School of Mines (2001), the University of Illinois (2007), and Northwestern University (2012). An internationally renowned scholar in the field of mechanical behavior of solids, a subject he and his students have researched for more than half a century. He started his research career with a series of important contributions on high temperature creep and fracture of metals in the 1960's. His publications in this area remain among the most important and highly cited in the field. Professor Nix is also well known for his work on the mechanisms of strain relaxation in heteroepitaxial thin films, plastic deformation of thin metal films on substrates, and the growth, characterization and modeling of thin film microstructures. His most recent work has dealt with the mechanical properties of nanostructured materials, size effects on the mechanical properties of crystalline materials (why smaller is stronger), and the mechanical behavior of lithiated nanostructures for use in advanced battery technologies. He has worked on an extraordinarily broad set of technical areas and has helped to define many of the most exciting frontiers in materials research in significant and long-lasting ways.
