Youth and early career Rice was born in 1940 in
Frederick, Maryland, son of Donald Blessing Rice and Mary Celia (Santangelo) Rice. A seminal contribution was the below-listed paper in Philosophical Magazine with Robb Thomson of the National Bureau of Standards (now
NIST) on the critical conditions for the emission of dislocations from crack tips, and thus the criterion for blunting versus propagation of a brittle crack.
Further career and recognition Since 1981 Rice teaches at
Harvard University. Since 2001, he has served as the Mallinckrodt Professor of Engineering Sciences and Geophysics in the
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In 1994, he received the
Timoshenko Medal "for seminal contributions to the understanding of plasticity and fracture of engineering materials and applications in the development in the computational and experimental methods of broad significance in mechanical engineering practice". He was also awarded
The Franklin Institute's Francis J. Clamer Medal in 1996. In 2008, he was awarded the Panetti-Ferrari International Prize for Applied Mechanics. In 2016 the
ASME awarded him the
ASME Medal. In 2021 he received the
Harvey Prize of the Technion in Israel. Rice was elected a member of the
National Academy of Engineering in 1980 for providing a sound and practical basis for the needed rapid development of inelastic fracture mechanics. He was also elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1981. In March 1996 he was elected as a Foreign member of the
Royal Society. In 2015, the Society of Engineering Science established the James R. Rice Medal to honor Rice's contributions to the engineering sciences. == Selected publications ==