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Dr. Kenneth H. Jack
 Dr. Kenneth H. Jack
Dr. Jack is Emeritus Professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Honorary Professor of Materials Engineering at the University of Wales, Swansea. After earning his BSc and MSc in Chemistry from Newcastle, he got his PhD in Physics and later an ScD in Materials from Cambridge.
From 1941-57 he taught chemistry at Newcastle, conducted metallurgical and crystallographic research for BISRA at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, and worked as a research engineer at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. In 1957 he became Research Director of Thermal Syndicate Ltd. at Wallsend, and was also a co-founder of an associated company NELAS, which led to a professorship at Newcastle in 1964. There he established the Wolfson Research Group for High-Strength Materials, covering metals, ceramics and glasses. After retirement in 1984, Dr. Jack continued research as a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow and then as a consultant to the Cookson Group.
From 1957-64, Jack’s manufacture of the world’s purest silica, “Spectrosil”, necessary for the contamination-free melting of silicon, was vital in producing the silicon “chip”. In 1961 he made the first British laser-quality ruby and, with a Newcastle hospital, developed the first British laser ophthalmoscope for pinning back detached retinas. Jack may be best known to metallurgists for his discovery of metal-nitrogen GP zones and their applications in “high-nitrogen” steels; or perhaps to ceramists, for his prediction and then production of new engineering ceramics, the “sialons”, both crystalline and vitreous.
Dr. Jack is the author of nearly 200 papers and 12 patents. His 19 major awards included honorary membership of the Société Française de Métallurgie, the Materials Research Society of India, and the Ceramic Society of Japan. In 1989, he was selected to give The American Ceramic Society’s Sosman Memorial Lecture. |
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