David Dunand

David Dunand was born in Geneva, Switzerland and got a BS/MS degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH, Zurich) in materials science in 1986.

He then joined as a graduate student the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he got his Ph.D. in 1991. After a brief postdoc in the group of his Ph.D. adviser (Prof. Andreas Mortensen, now at EPFL, Lausanne), he was hired by MIT’s DMSE department as an Assistant Professor and was later promoted to Associate Professor. In 1997, he moved to Northwestern University, where he is currently the James N. and Margie M. Krebs Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and co-director of the Initiative for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN). His research focuses on experimental and theoretical studies of the mechanical properties of metallic alloys, composites and foams, and connection of these properties to microstructure and processing.

For this and his current project, a comparative study of the relationship between science and the law in France and America from the sixteenth century to the present, he has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the American Bar Foundation. He has also served on the executive councils of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology, as well as an advisory editor on their respective journals, Isis and Technology & Culture. He also founded Northwestern’s science studies program, known as the Science in Human Culture Program.