George Pharr, PhD

George Pharr is a professor of materials science & engineering at Texas A&M University.

George started at Texas A&M in 2017 after working for 18 years at Rice University in Houston and 18 years in a joint faculty appointment at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Pharr received a doctorate in materials science and engineering from Stanford in 1979. In 2014, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Throughout his 40 years of research, he has focused on measuring material strength at the nanoscale. The method he pioneered has been named nanoindentation.

Nanoindentation was initially developed for electronics. In the 1990s, the importance of nanoindentation grew with the boom of the semiconductor industry. Semiconductors use silicon wafers with very thin films to create the chips used in many electronics such as computers, phones and watches.

Nanoindentation is now used in many industries, including health care. Recently, researchers used the technique to study changes in cancerous cells. When a cell becomes cancerous, its stiffness changes. This change can be measured to determine if an individual cell is cancerous.