Gregory McKenna

Short Bio:

Gregory B. McKenna attended the U.S. Air Force Academy from which he received his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Mechanics in 1970. As part of his active duty he attended MIT where he earned a Masters Degree in the area of composite materials before being stationed at Hill Air Force Base in Ogden Utah, where he served as a Test Evaluation Engineer until 1975 when he left the Air Force at the rank of Captain. While in Utah, he also obtained a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Utah, graduating in 1976. Dr. McKenna was honored with a National Research Council Postdoc at the then National Bureau of Standards (NBS) and accepted a permanent position at NBS (now NIST) in 1977. He was the head of the Structure and Mechanics Group in the Polymers Division at NIST from August 1992 until July 1999 when he moved to Texas Tech University as Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and John R. Bradford Endowed Chair in Engineering. In 2005 he became a Paul Whitfield Horn Professor at TTU. Dr. McKenna has earned a reputation as a pioneering researcher in multiple areas of polymers and materials physics and engineering, including physics of glasses, solid mechanics and nonlinear viscoelasticity of polymers, thermodynamics and mechanics of elastomers and gels, and molecular rheology. He has over 230 publications that have been cited over 15,000 times. Dr. McKenna is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Society of Plastics Engineers, the Society of Engineering Science, the North American Thermal Analysis Society (NATAS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is the recipient of multiple awards including the International Award from the Society of Plastics Engineers, the Mettler-Toledo Award of NATAS, and the Bingham Medal of the Society of Rheology. He has served as Chairman of the Polymer Physics Division of the APS, President of the Society of Engineering Science, and President of the Society of Rheology.