Leon Keer
Department of Civil Engineering

Leon Keer (Ph.D., University of Minnesota), Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil Engineering. Professor Keer’s research is in the area of solid mechanics; specialized topics he investigates include fracture and fatigue, surface mechanics and tribology, among others. He is a former North Atlantic Treaty Organization Postdoctoral Fellow (1962-63), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (1972-73) and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow (1986). In 1997 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. His recent awards include: Member of the Honorary Scientific Advisory Board for Mechanics and Materials (1999); Departmental Academic Advisor, Department of Civil and structural Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnical University, Hong Kong (1998); Honorary Scientific Advisory Board of the Journal, Mechanics of Materials (1998). He has recently submitted an educational proposal (IGERT) to the NSF for a project dealing with the development of a virtual tribology system and involving faculty from Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science, Chemistry and Physics. In that project he expects to collaborate with a group of researchers at INSA-Lyon, with whom he has worked in the past, and to invite a professor from the Ecole Polytechnique (Laboratoire de mécanique des solides) to give a short course in optimal intelligent design.

l-keer@northwestern.edu