Robert Carpick

Robert William Carpick is a Canadian mechanical engineer. He is currently director of diversity, equity, and inclusion and John Henry Towne Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is best known for his work in tribology, particularly nanotribology.

Education Carpick received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Toronto in 1991, and his master's degree and Doctor of Philosophy in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997. His PhD supervisor was Miquel Salmeron, who pioneered the use of atomic force microscopy (AFM) in tribology. During his PhD, Carpick devised a method to obtain reproducible and quantitative friction measurements using AFM.

Research career After his PhD, he spent two years as a postdoctoral appointee at Sandia National Laboratory in the Surface and Interface Science Department, and then the Biomolecular Materials and Interfaces Department, where he worked under the supervision of Dr Alan R. Burns. He has shown that frictional ageing of the contacts between rock surfaces arises from the formation of interfacial chemical bonds. He found that the wear of AFM tips cannot be adequately described by macroscale models and instead is driven by nanoscale mechanochemical processes. According to Google Scholar, as of 2021, his work had been cited on over 16,000 occasions.

Honours and awards Carpick was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012, a Fellow of the American Vacuum Society in 2014, a Fellow of the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers in 2016, a Fellow of the Materials Research Society in 2017, and a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 2019.

Personal life Carpick has been married to his partner since 2003. He is also a fan and practitioner of curling and the organ.