Rodney C. Ewing

Rodney Charles Ewing (September 20, 1946 – July 13, 2024) was an American mineralogist, a materials scientist and a nuclear safety expert whose research was focused on the properties of nuclear materials exposed to radiation and long-term geochemical alterations expected for radioactive waste disposal.

He was the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy, an Affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a professor in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University.

He was also elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for studies on the long-term behavior of complex ceramic materials to assess their suitability for engineered nuclear waste sequestration.

Biography and education Born in Abilene, Texas, Ewing attended Texas Christian University (B.S., 1968, summa cum laude) and graduate school at Stanford University (M.S., 1972; Ph.D., 1974). From 1969 to 1970, he served in the United States Army as a Vietnamese interpreter attached to the 25th Infantry Division.

Career Ewing began his academic career as an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico (1974) rising to the rank of Regents’ Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences in 1993. From 1997 to 2013, he was a professor at the University of Michigan in three Departments: Earth & Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences, and Materials Science & Engineering. In 2009, he was appointed as the Edward H. Kraus University Professor at the University of Michigan. In 2014, he joined Stanford University as a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and as a professor in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences. He was a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy. He was Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security and co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Research His early research focused on an esoteric group of minerals, metamictization Nb-Ta-Ti oxides that are unusual because they have become amorphous due to radiation damage caused by the presence of radioactive elements. Over the past forty years, the early study of these unusual minerals has blossomed into a broadly based research program on radiation effects in complex ceramic materials. This has led to the development of techniques to predict the long-term behavior of materials, such as those used in radioactive waste disposal. He was the author or co-author of over 750 research publications and the editor or co-editor of 18 monographs, proceedings volumes or special issues of journals. He has published widely in mineralogy, geochemistry, materials science, nuclear materials, physics and chemistry in over 100 different ISI journals. He has been granted a patent for the development of a highly durable material for the immobilization of plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons. He was a founding editor of the magazine, Elements, which is now supported by 18 earth science societies. He was a Principal Editor for Nano LIFE, an interdisciplinary journal focused on collaboration between physical and medical scientists. In 2014, he was appointed as one of the Founding Executive Editors of Geochemical Perspective Letters and to the Editorial Advisory Board for Applied Physics Reviews.

Honors Ewing has received the Hawley Medal of the Mineralogical Association of Canada in 1997 and 2002, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Dana Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2006, the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006, an honorary doctorate from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2007, the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2015, the Ian Campbell Medal of the American Geoscience Institute in 2015 and the Medal of Excellence from the International Mineralogical Association in 2015. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a fellow of the Geological Society of America, Mineralogical Society of America, Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland (honorary), American Geophysical Union, Geochemical Society and European Association of Geochemistry, American Ceramic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Materials Research Society.

He has been a member of program committees for the symposium on the Scientific Basis for Nuclear Waste Management held in ten different countries over the past 40 years. He was a co-editor and a contributing author of Radioactive Waste Forms for the Future (North-Holland Physics, Amsterdam, 1988) and Uncertainty Underground—Yucca Mountain and the Nation's High-Level Nuclear Waste (MIT Press, 2006). Professor Ewing has served on thirteen National Research Council committees for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that have reviewed issues related to nuclear waste and nuclear weapons. In 2008, he was a technical cooperation expert for the IAEA at the Comissão Nacional de Energia Nuclear in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 2014, he was reappointed by Barack Obama to serve as the Chair of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which is responsible for ongoing and integrated technical review of DOE activities related to transporting, packaging, storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. He stepped down from the Board in 2017.

He was president of the Mineralogical Society of America (2002) and the International Union of Materials Research Societies (1997–1998). Ewing also served on the board of directors of the Geochemical Society (2012–2015), the Board of Governors of the Gemological Institute of America (2006–2015) and the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2012–2022).

Notable publications