George ‘Rusty’ Gray
South Dakota Mines News:
RAPID CITY, S.D. — South Dakota Mines 184th commencement ceremony recognized George ‘Rusty’ Gray, a Los Alamos resident and LANL Fellow, among 10 distinguished alumni honorees from both 2020 and 2021.
Gray graduated from South Dakota Mines with a bachelor’s degree in 1976 and a master’s degree in 1977, both in metallurgical engineering. In 1981, he received a PhD in metallurgical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University.
In 1982, he began a post-doctoral fellowship at the Technische Universitaet Hamburg-Harburg in Germany where he studied the influence of microstructure on the fatigue behavior of several titanium alloys.
Gray joined Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 1985. Over the past 37 years, he has conducted independent research on the structure/property relationships during the deformation of materials, in particular in response to high-strain-rate and shock deformation.
He has developed and promoted the use of “soft” shock recovery techniques for systematically studying the influence of shockwave loading parameters on post-shock material response.
Gray has promoted dynamic structure/property research on materials and worked to further the development of dynamic materials and condensed matter research within the materials and physics communities, DOE, the DoD and industry. He is a lab fellow and scientist 6 at LANL.
He is a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (UK) where he was on sabbatical in 1998. He co-chaired the Physical Metallurgy Gordon Conference in 2000. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), a fellow of ASM International, and a fellow of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS). He is a member of APS, ASM, TMS, and serves on the advisory board of the European DYMAT Association. In 2010, he served as the president of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society. In 2012, he became the chair of the Acta Materialia Board of Governors, which oversees the publication of the journals Acta Materialia, Scripta Materialia, Acta Biomaterialia, and Materialia.
Gray has authored or co-authored more than 480 publications. In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). In 2018, he was awarded the Rinehart Award from the European DYMAT Association. In 2019, the American Physical Society awarded him the 2019 George E. Duvall Shock Compression Science Award.
In January 2020, Gray was awarded the American Ceramic Society ICACC Plenary Lecture. Since August 2020, he has served on the congressionally-mandated National Academy Study Panel Assessing the Feasibility of the Strategic Long-Range Canon (SLRC) for the US Army.
The Distinguished Alumni recognized by South Dakota Mines have excelled in their careers and exhibited excellence in giving back to their communities as leaders in the fields of science and engineering. Read about the accomplishments of other honorees at the 184th commencement in the university event program.
