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Colloquia & Seminars

John E. Dorn Lecture

Biography

John E. Dorn (1909–1971) was the most distinguished and well-known metallurgical alumnus of Northwestern University. In the late 1950s he helped his alma mater, which then had a very small materials science department, to receive Department of Defense funding to host one the nation’s first three Materials Research Centers. Both the center and the department were launched on a path to their present world-renowned stature.

Dorn was particularly famous for his work on the high-temperature creep of metals. He and his best-known student, Oleg Sherby, who went on to become a professor at Stanford University, established that the activation energy of high temperature creep is the same as that of self-diffusion. Sherby was the first Dorn lecturer in 1974.

A Chicago native, Dorn received both BS (1931) and MS (1932) degrees in chemistry from Northwestern and a PhD (1936) in physical chemistry from the University of Minnesota. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, he became a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent the rest of his career in physical metallurgy, a field that attracted many chemistry-trained scientists at the time. He was known as an outstanding teacher as well as research scientist.

Dorn authored or co-authored 180 research papers. His honors included the ASTM Charles Dudley Medal (1958), the ASM Howe Medal (1959), the ASTM Gillette Lectureship (1962), and the ASM Albert Easton White Distinguished Teacher Award (1964). He was elected a medallion member of the Honneur Société Francaise de Metallurgie in 1968. He received an honorary PhD from Northwestern in 1971.

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Linda Nazar, Univ. of Waterloo
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Stephen Pennycook
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John Kilner, Imperial College, London
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Harry Atwater, Caltech
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Tresa Pollock, University of California, Santa Barbara
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Feb. 12, 2013

Pulickel Ajayan, Rice University
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Eduard Arzt, Saarland University
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Evelyn Hu, Harvard University
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Patricia Dehmer, U.S. Dept of Energy
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John Rogers, UIUC
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Prof. Steve Granick, University of Illinois 
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Elizabeth Holm, Sandia National Laboratories
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Prof. Darrell Schlom, Penn State University
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Dr. Christopher Wolverton, Ford Research Laboratory
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Dr. Phaedon Avouris, IBM
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