Edward J. Kramer
Edward J. Kramer - University of California, Santa Barbara
2009 Turnbull Lecturer
"For outstanding contributions in bringing insights and understanding to flux pinning in superconductors and the the fundamentals of fracture, diffusions, interface phenomena in complex polymeric materials through research, teaching, mentoring, writing, and lecturing."
Edward J. Kramer received a B.Ch.E. Degree in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University in 1962 and a Ph.D. in Metallurgy and Materials Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1966. He was a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford with Sir Peter Hirsch, FRS, before joining the faculty of Cornell University in 1967, where he was appointed the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 1988. At Cornell, his initial research focused on understanding of flux lattice pinning by dislocations, small precipitates, grain boundaries, and surfaces in model superconductors. His paper in the Journal of Applied Physics 1973 showing that the flux pinning force depends on both the elastic and plastic deformation of the flux lattice is one of the most highly cited in this field.
By the 1970s, Kramer had developed a program of research on polymers, becoming a pioneering advocate for the inclusion of structure-properties processing of polymers as part of the developing field of materials science. Important to his success were the many talented PhD students and postdocs who joined his research team, and who in turn became influential faculty and industrialists. At Cornell, he began research on the microscopic aspects of crazing, a pre-fracture cavitational mode of plastic deformation which controls the fracture behavior of glassy polymers. He discovered the mechanisms by which crazes increase in width ("surface drawing"), increase in length (Taylor meniscus instability), and break down to form true cracks ("fibril breakdown"). He was the first to demonstrate experimentally that the formation of crazes can be inhibited by the network of entangled polymer chains inherited from the melt. Using ion beam techniques, he was able to measure the diffusion of long polymer molecules in the melt. He pioneered the use of marker techniques to measure mass flows during polymer-polymer interdiffusion; these measurements revealed that the then-dominant theory, which required cancellation of diffusion fluxes so that the slower-moving polymer species controls the interdiffusion, could not be correct. He also made the first measurements of both the interdiffusion and tracer diffusion in a polymer blend (or alloy). These demonstrated that chemically different molecules of the same length could diffuse at vastly different rates in the same melt and that the thermodynamic interaction between polymer segments in such blends can lead to large enhancement in the rate of interdiffusion.
In 1997, Kramer joined the faculty of University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he now holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Materials and Chemical Engineering. At USCB, he has emphasized the lateral organization of block copolymers on chemically and topologically patterned substrates, which recently has led to the discovery that spherical-domain block copolymers can be induced to form single-crystal layers using small surface steps to template the order. His experimental studies of melting of these 2D arrays, of both spheres and cylinders, have provided critical tests of 25-year-old theories of 2D melting and have led to optimum methods for processing these block copolymer films to achieve highly ordered nanostructures. His work has been influential in establishing block copolymer lithography as a potential method to extend optical lithography to smaller feature sizes. Kramer’s research probing the fundamentals of the interaction of polymer-coated nanoparticles with the interfaces of block copolymers has led to the discovery that these nanoparticles can behave as surfactants, bringing dramatic changes in block copolymer morphology at even small volume fractions.
Kramer is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was awarded a Senior Scientist Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung in 1987 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1988. In 1989, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 1995, he was awarded the Docteur honoris causa by L’Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He won the Polymer Physics prize of the American Physical Society in 1985, the Swinburne Medal of the Institute of Materials in 1996, the Polymeer Technologie Nederland Medema Award of the Dutch Polymer Society in 2007, and the American Chemical Society Polymer Materials: Science and Engineering, Cooperative Research Award in 2008.
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