Richard C. Bradt

Richard C. Bradt received his BS from MIT, then his MS and PhD from RPI after a period in industry. As an undergraduate at MIT he had Prof. Kingery as a classroom teacher for the course upon which Kingery wrote the first edition of his famous textbook.  Dick joined the faculty of Penn State in 1967, then went on to Washington, Nevada and Alabama.  Bradt held the endowed Kyocera Professorship at UW and the endowed Alton N. Scott Chair at Alabama.  He has spent sabbaticals in Japan, Brazil, Chile and Great Britain.  He is currently Professor Emeritus at The University of Alabama.   

 Prof. Bradt has received several ACerS honors including the Bleininger Award, the Planje-St. Louis Refractories Award, the Fulrath Award, the Jeppson Award and the CEC Outstanding Educator Award.  He was the Arthur Friedberg Laureate in 1994.  Dick also received the Mineral Industries Educator of the year award from AIME, the Wilson Undergraduate Teaching award from Penn State and the Burnum Award for the outstanding faculty member at The University of Alabama.  He is a Fellow of both ACerS and ASM, an Academician of the World Academy of Ceramics and a Distinguished Life Member of UNITECR, the international refractories organization. He served on the UNITECR executive board for eight years after helping found the group and also served on the executive board of the World Academy of Ceramics.

Dr. Bradt has served on the editorial boards of numerous international journals and has been active in international collaborations.  The Japanese have honored him with the Centennial Award of the Ceramic Society of Japan, made him an Honorary Member of MRS – Japan, awarded him the International Prize of the JFCA and also the Academic Prize of the Ceramic Society of Japan. He has hosted more than 20 Japanese scholars.  This past year he gave invited presentations at the Brazilian Ceramic Society, a joint Argentine-Chilean Symposium and a Korean-Japanese Joint Seminar.    

With his students and colleagues, Prof. Bradt has co-authored nearly 400 manuscripts, more than 100 of which have been in the ACerS Journal or Bulletin.  He has advised or coadvised over 100 graduate students and directed 50 Ph.D. theses.  Twelve of his former graduate students hold university positions around the world.  Dick has edited more than 20 proceedings of international meetings. The fracture mechanics of ceramics series and the deformation of ceramics series are well known.  However, the Fractography of Glass book with Dick Tressler and the International Ceramics Education volume with Lisa Klein are perhaps the most popular.

Prof. Bradt has been a member of ACerS for nearly 50 years.  He belongs to the Refractory Ceramics, the Basic Science and the Glass and Optical Materials Divisions.  He also belongs to NICE and Keramos. He has held all of the elective offices of the Refractory Ceramics Division and also offices in the Central Pennsylvania and the Pacific Northwest Sections of ACerS. Dick has served on the Board of Trustees and was an ACerS Vice-President. He has been on numerous ACerS committees, the most interesting being that of Program Chairman of the annual meeting for the first time that >1,000 papers were presented.

Dr. Bradt continues to publish in the archival literature while writing several textbooks. His research follows the topical lines of the cleavage of minerals and the fracture of structural ceramics, refractories and glasses.  Other areas of interest include the ISE of hardness measurements and hardness anisotropy of single crystals, thermal shock, industrial refractories, microstructures in varistor ceramic systems and fractography, particularly the evolving crack patterns after fracture initiation in glass.  On the lighter side he is interested in the mechanics of the flint knapping of lithic materials (arrowheads).