James R. Rice

James Robert Rice ( born December 3, 1940 in Frederick ( Maryland)) is an American engineer scientist for theoretical mechanics and geophysicists. He is a professor at Harvard University

Rice graduated from Lehigh University with a bachelor's degree in engineering in 1962, the master's degree in 1963 and his doctorate in applied mechanics at Ferdinand Beer 1964. Afterwards, he was Assistant Professor and from 1970 professor at Brown University and from 1981 professor at Harvard. He's there now Mallinckrodt Professor of Engineering Science and Geophysics.

He is particularly concerned with hydrodynamics and solid mechanics with applications in geophysics and geotechnical engineering, especially stress, deformation, cracking and rivers in the context of earthquakes and mechanics of ice and glaciers, landslides, tsunamis and hydrology.

He has been a visiting professor and visiting scientist at the Isaac Newton Institute at the Ecole Normale Superieure ( Blaise Pascal Professor ), Stanford, Cambridge and at Caltech (as Fairchild Scholar ).

In 1994 he received the Timoshenko Medal and he received the William Prager Medal, 2012, the Louis Néel Medal and he received the Walter H. Bucher Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Academie des Sciences ( 1996), member of the Spanish Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He is six honorary doctorates (Grenoble, Technion, University of Paris VI, Lehigh, Northwestern, Brown).