Regents’ Professor and Carter N. Paden, Jr. Distinguished Chair in Metals Processing, Dave McDowell joined Georgia Tech in 1983 and holds appointments in both the GWW School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering.  He served as Director of the Mechanical Properties Research Laboratory from 1992-2012.  He served from 2012 through 2020 as Executive Director of the Institute for Materials (IMat), a Georgia Tech interdisciplinary research institute charged with cultivating cross-cutting collaborations in materials research and education.  In that role he led major transformational initiatives in both campus materials user facilities and in accelerating materials discovery and development by building on the synergy of experiments, computational simulation, and materials data science and informatics, supporting Integrated Computational Materials Engineering and the U.S. Materials Genome Initiative.

McDowell's research focuses on the development of physically-based, microstructure-sensitive constitutive models for nonlinear and time-dependent behavior of materials, with emphasis on wrought and cast metals. Topics of interest include finite strain inelasticity and defect field mechanics, microstructure-sensitive computational approaches to deformation and damage of heterogeneous materials, with emphasis on metal fatigue, atomistic and coarse-grained atomistic simulations of dislocations, dynamic deformation and failure of materials, irradiation effects on materials, and multiscale modeling.  He has contributed to schemes for computational materials science and mechanics to inform systems design of materials (Integrated Design of Multiscale, Multifunctional Materials and Products, Elsevier, 2009, ISBN-13: 978-1-85617-662-0).  A Fellow of ASM International, SES, ASME, AAM and TMS, McDowell received the 1997 ASME Materials Division Nadai Award and the 2008 Khan International Medal for lifelong contributions to the field of metal plasticity.  He was honored in 2019 by Georgia Tech as recipient of the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor given annually to a Tech faculty member. McDowell currently serves on the editorial boards of npj:Computational Materials and several other journals.  He served as co-Editor of the International Journal of Fatigue from 2008-2020.