Professor of Engineering, Professor of Physics

Overview

Professor Powers received an S.B. in Physics and an S.B. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989. In 1995, he received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania, with Prof. Phil Nelson serving as his advisor. After Penn, he held postdoctoral positions in the physics departments of Princeton University and the University of Arizona with Prof. Ray Goldstein. Then he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University with Howard Stone in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He joined the Division of Engineering of Brown University in 2000 as the first holder of the James R. Rice Term Chair in Solid Mechanics. Since 2020, he has been the associate editor of Reviews of Modern Physics for Fluid, Geometric, and Solid Mechanics.  From 2009 to 2014 he was associate editor of Reviews of Modern Physics for biological physics.  Powers is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Brown Affiliations

Research Areas

On the Web