John W. Rudnicki

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering

Phone: (847) 491-3411
Fax: (847) 491-4011
E-mail: jwrudn@northwestern.edu

Web Page:

Professor Rudnicki earned his undergraduate (Sc.B) and graduate degrees (Sc. M. and Ph.D) in engineering at Brown University. Prior to coming to Northwestern in 1981, he was a postdoctoral Research Fellow in Geophysics at Caltech for 18 months, and then Assistant Professor in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign for three years.

Professor Rudnicki’s research has been in the general area of inelastic behavior and failure of solids, particularly, geomaterials. He has been especially interested in the development of localized deformation and in the effects of coupling between deformation and fluid diffusion, in connection with applications to the mechanics of earthquakes, energy storage and recovery, disposal of toxic wastes and geological sequestration of CO2. In 1977, he received the Award for Outstanding Research in Rock Mechanics from the U.S. National Committee on Rock Mechanics, for the paper "Conditions for the localization of deformation in pressure sensitive dilatant materials" (with J.R. Rice), J. Mech. Phys. Solids, 23, 371 394, 1975 and in 2006 he received the 2006 Maurice A. Biot Medal from the ASCE for "For his fundamental contributions to the mechanics of porous media and its applications to rock mechanics and geophysics."

He has a held a variety of editorial and committee assignments. He is currently Chairman of the Geosciences Council for the Dept. of Energy Basic Energy Sciences, a member of the Advisory Council of the Southern California Earthquake Center, a member of Editorial Advisory Board of the International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics.

He teaches a variety of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level and has recently developed an undergraduate course on Mechanics of Sports.