Dr. Harris is a principal engineer at Engineering Mechanics Technology (EMT), Inc. and has some 30 years of experience in fracture mechanics and solid mechanics analysis and applications. His background is in mechanical engineering, and he has extensive experience in probabilistic structural mechanics, especially as related to fracture mechanics.

Dr. Harris began his career as a mechanical engineer at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (LRL) in Livermore, California. After several years at LRL, Dr. Harris joined one of the earliest vendors of acoustic emission instrumentation, Dunegan Corporation, as Director of Research. After four years at Dunegan Corporation, Dr. Harris joined Science Application, Inc. (SAI, now known as SAIC) in their Palo Alto office. During his seven years at SAI, Dr. Harris’ efforts included performing some of the earliest applications of PFM to nuclear reactor piping. He was the principal developer of the PRAISE code, which was developed for the USNRC. The PRAISE code is based on PFM and is one of the most widely applied tools for evaluation of the reliability of weldments in nuclear reactor piping.

Dr. Harris worked at Failure Analysis Associates for over ten years. During this time he developed and applied fracture mechanics to a wide variety of problems, ranging from railroad wheels to rocket ship engines. These efforts included both deterministic and probabilistic aspects, and involved both computer software development and applications to industrial problems. He was the manager of the Fracture Mechanics section, which included some five engineers involved in fracture mechanics and related finite element stress analysis. He was the principal developer of the NASCRAC code, which is a general purpose code for deterministic analysis of crack growth that was developed for NASA.

Dr. Harris is currently a vice-president and principal engineer at EMT a company that he was involved in founding some seven years ago. EMT is an engineering consulting firm that specializes in fracture mechanics, life prediction and related software — both deterministic and probabilistic. Efforts at EMT include development of the PRAISE code in Windows (WinPRAISE), including enhancements to make the software easier to use in routine applications, and expansion of PRAISE to include crack initiation due to cyclic loading in air and water environments. He was also involved in the development of commercial fracture mechanics software — including linear and nonlinear SmartCrack. BLESS is a code for analysis of reliability of headers and piping in fossil-fired power plants that was developed with support of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). BLESS is a physics-based model that considers both crack initiation and growth due to creep and cyclic loading.

Dr. Harris has been involved in ASME activities related to reliability considerations in design and inspection of nuclear reactor piping. He was an original member of the ASME Research Task Force on Risk-Based Inspection Guidelines, and was the editor of Volume 3 of a series of reports published by this committee. Volume 3 was on applications to fossil fired power plants. He is currently vice chairman of the Risk Technology Committee of the ASME. Dr. Harris is a member of ASTM as well as ASME. He has nearly 100 publications in the open literature, primarily in the areas of acoustic emission and fracture mechanics. He received a B. S. and M. S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington and a Ph. D. in applied mechanics from Stanford University.