Mark E. Mear, PhD

Email: mear@mail.utexas.edu
Phone: (512) 471-4212
Office: ASE 5.220 (map)

Dr. Mear received a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering with highest honors in 1982 from the University of Texas at Austin. He received a S.M. degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1984, a M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Engineering Science from Harvard in 1986. He spent one year as a post-doctoral fellow at Cambridge University before joining the faculty at the University of Texas. Dr. Mear has received numerous teaching awards, including the Lockheed Martin Excellence in Engineering Teaching award in 2000 and the Texas Exes Teaching Award in 2006.

Dr. Mear specializes in the mechanics of solids. His major technical interests are in theoretical and applied solid mechanics, with an emphasis on the mechanical behavior of materials and fracture mechanics. The focus of his recent work has been in the areas of micromechanics and computational fracture mechanics. He has served on the Cockrell School of Engineering faculty since 1987 and has published numerous technical articles and reports.

The work in micromechanics has primarily been concerned with the plastic deformation and creep of materials which are reinforced by second phase particulates or weakened by microvoids. The objective of the work has been to provide an understanding of the effect of the second phase upon the “overall” behavior of the aggregate material, and this has been achieved by performing detailed analytical/numerical investigations for various (idealized) material systems of interest. The work in computational fracture mechanics has been directed toward devising advanced techniques for fully three dimensional fracture analysis. While the methods being developed can be classified as boundary element procedures, they are based upon new weakly-singular, weak-form integral equations which are particularly well suited for numerical treatment.