Robert Harvey Dodds, Jr

Biography

Robert H. Dodds Jr. holds a B.S. (University of Memphis 1973), M.S. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1975) and the Ph.D. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1978), all in civil engineering. He served on the faculty at the University of Kansas from 1979-1987 before returning to Illinois in 1987. He was the Nathan M. Newmark Professor of Civil Engineering from 1996–2000 and in 2000 became the inaugural holder of the M.T. Geoffrey Yeh Chair in Civil Engineering.  He served as department head of CEE from 2004-2009.

Dr. Dodds taught undergraduate and graduate courses on structural analysis, finite element methods, fatigue and fracture mechanics and software development-design methods for civil engineering. He retired in 2012.

In 1996, Dr. Dodds became Co-Editor of Engineering Fracture Mechanics, a leading international journal on fracture mechanics for the past 30 years. He is an Associate Editor for the International Journal for Engineering with Computers and the international journal Engineering Computations. He is a Contributing Editor to the International Journal for Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures. Professor Dodds previously served as an Associate Editor for ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering.

He has won several research awards, most notably the American Society of Civil Engineers Walter L. Huber Research Prize (1992), and the Nathan M. Newmark Medal (2001), the George R. Irwin Medal from ASTM (2000) and the 2001 Award of Merit with Fellow status from ASTM. He won the 2000 Munro Prize for the best paper published in the International Journal of Engineering Structures (with his Ph.D. student Carlos Matos).

Dr. Dodds was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008.

Research Statement

Dr. Dodds' research interests focus on the field of nonlinear fracture mechanics fatigue and associated computational methods. Results of his research have wide ranging applications in civil engineering, offshore, petro-chemical, naval and aerospace structures. Professor Dodds has published extensively in the areas of fracture mechanics, computational methods, and software engineering.