University Assistant Professor in Materials Engineering
Academic Division: Mechanics, Materials and Design
Telephone: TBA
Email: dhc40@cam.ac.uk
Research interests
My main research interests are in the mechanical properties, particularly the fracture behavior, of structural materials. I am interested in understanding how these properties emerge from phenomena that occur across multiple length scales (from the electronic structure of materials to micron-scale mechanisms of plastic deformation), so that we can design more damage-tolerant materials. My main experimental tool is linear- and non-linear elastic fracture mechanics, which is used in combination with scanning/transmission electron microscopy, various processing techniques, and computational methods to study these materials at the nanoscale.
Recent Publications:
“Competing mechanisms inhibit the ductile-brittle transition in refractory alloys,” D.H. Cook, X. Chen, M. O’Leary, S. I. Rao, W. Wang, C. H. Belcher, M. I. Payne, P. Borges, A. Deveraj, M. Asta, E. J. Lavernia, D. Apelian, A. M. Minor, D. Liu, P. Kumar, R. O. Ritchie, Nature (2026) In Press.
“Kink bands promote exceptional fracture resistance in a NbTaTiHf refractory medium-entropy alloy,” D. H. Cook, P. Kumar, M. I. Payne, C. H. Belcher, P. Borges, W. Wang, F. Walsh, Z. Li, A. Devaraj, M. Zhang, M. Asta, A. M. Minor, E. J. Lavernia, D. Apelian, R. O. Ritchie, Science 384, 178–184 (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adn2428
“Extended Rice–Thomson analysis and atomistic simulations revealing grain boundary effects on fracture in refractory high-entropy alloys,” W. Wang, D. H. Cook, X. Chen, P. Kumar, A. M. Minor, S. Rao, M. Asta, R. O. Ritchie, D. Farkas, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123 (15), e2536219123 (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2536219123
“A strong fracture-resistant high-entropy alloy with nano-bridged honeycomb microstructure intrinsically toughened by 3D printing,” P. Kumar*, S. Huang*, D. H. Cook*, K. Chen, U. Ramamurty, X. Tan, R. O. Ritchie, Nature Communications 15, 841 (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45178-2
Biography
David Cook is an Assistant Professor in Materials at the Department of Engineering in the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge, David was a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. David obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) from UC Berkeley in 2025 and his BS in MSE from UC Berkeley in 2022.
Department role and responsibilities