John P. Dear is a British academic and educator. He is a faculty member and Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Imperial College London, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Early life and education John Dear attended St John's College, Cambridge where he read Natural Sciences (Physics) as an undergraduate, followed by PhD study at St John's College, supervised by Professor John E. Field OBE FRS on high strain rate properties of materials subject to impact. After his PhD, John Dear was an SERC Research Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory and Hertha Ayrton Research Fellow at Girton College.
Career and research John Dear joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London in April 1988, as the BP Chemicals Lecturer, researching the structural integrity of plastic pipes and applying high-speed visualization techniques to fracture processes in composite materials. Since 1989, John has been a Chartered Engineer (UK) (CEng) and a Chartered Physicist (CPhys). In 2002, John was elected a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. In 2006 John was awarded the George Stephenson Medal by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers for best IMechE paper. In 2023, John was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Subsequently, John Dear pioneered and led a group that has developed 3D high-speed speckle strain mapping and other strain visualisation techniques, with related Finite Element damage modelling, for assessment of the safety of engineering structures. This work, in collaboration with Professor Tony Kinloch FREng FRS, has been applied to impact of composite and laminated glass structures for civil aircraft and aeroengines, for Airbus and Rolls-Royce, as well as explosive blast mitigation research of building façade structures with the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure - CPNI. This research was for risk assessment of the terrorist threats to buildings and vehicles. The techniques have also been employed to develop blast resilient composite structures for the US Office of Naval Research. Recently, John Dear's research group has focused on drop-weight impact of thermoplastic composites with associated modelling of damage and subsequent repair of composites.
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