Dr. GEORGE G. ADAMS

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF MECHANICAL AND INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING

027 Lake Hall

Biographical Sketch

Dr. George G. Adams is Professor Emeritus in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department. Prior to retiring in July 2020, he was College of Engineering Distinguished Professor (Affiliated Appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering and with Civil and Environmental Engineering) at Northeastern University where he has served on the faculty since 1979. His areas of expertise are in Applied Mechanics, in particular contact mechanics, adhesion, and tribology; MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS), especially RF MEMS switches and micromirrors; nano-mechanics (including materials characterization, adhesion, and mechanical and electrical contacts); and the dynamic response of structures to moving loads (including friction-induced vibrations and other instabilities). He has published over 100 refereed journal papers and has had numerous research grants and contracts with government and industry. He is best known for discovering a phenomenon, which became known as the Adams Instability, whereby the frictional sliding of two bodies against each other is dynamically unstable even with a speed-independent friction coefficient.

George received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cooper Union in 1969, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (Applied Mechanics) from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972 and 1975 respectively. Dr. Adams then became an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, and then a Research Associate at the IBM Research Laboratory in San Jose, California, prior to joining Northeastern University in 1979. He has served as an Associate Editor for numerous journals and co-founded and served as the first chair of the Contact Mechanics Technical Committee of the Tribology Division of ASME. He is a Fellow of the ASME and the STLE.

Complete resume in pdf.