Robert McMeeking completed his Ph.D. in solid mechanics at Brown University in 1976 and then was a post-doc for 2 years at Stanford University. Thereafter he joined the faculty of the Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Department in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He moved to UCSB in 1985 as Professor of Materials and of Mechanical Engineering, and was Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering 1992-1995 and again during 1999-2003. He has published approximately 300 papers on a variety of subjects in the mechanics of materials area. McMeeking was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Mechanics from 2002 to 2012, and is currently Secretary of the Congress Committee of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and President of the International Congress on Fracture. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and held a Humboldt Award for Senior Scientists in 2006 and again in 2013. He was awarded the Brown Engineering Alumni Medal in 2007, the 2014 William Prager Medal of the Society of Engineering Science, and the 2014 Timoshenko Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
