Johannes Weertman


Johannes Weertman was an American materials scientist and geophysicist.

Biography

Born in 1925 in Fairfield, Alabama, Weertman served in the United States Marine Corps for three years. He then received from Carnegie Institute of Technology his bachelor's degree in 1948 and his Ph.D. in physics in 1951 under the supervision of James Koehler. As a postdoc Weertman was a Fulbright Fellow at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Beginning in 1952 he was at the US Naval Research Laboratory. At Northwestern University he became in 1959 an associate professor and then a full professor; in 1963 he became there a professor of geophysics and from 1968 Walter P. Murphy Professor for Materials Science and Engineering.
He was from 1967 to 1991 a consultant for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1964 he was a visiting professor at Caltech. From 1960 to 1975 he was a consultant for the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. He was also a consultant for the Bain Laboratory of the US Steel Corporation and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 1986 he was a visiting scientist at the Swiss reactor research institute and in 1971–1972 at Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.
Weertman Island off Antarctica is named after him. Weertman was married since 1950 to Julia Randall Weertman and had a son and a daughter. He died on October 13, 2018 at the age of 93.

Awards and honors

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