James Stark Koehler (10 November 1914 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin – 19 June 2006 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American physicist, specializing in metal defects and their interactions. He is known for the eponymous Peach-Koehler stress formula.[1] [2]
Koehler received 1935 his bachelor's degree from Oshkosh State Teachers College (now called the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh). In 1940 he received from the University of Michigan his Ph.D. under David M. Dennison with a thesis Hindered rotation in methyl-alcohol. After a postdoc fellowship in 1940–1941, supervised by Frederick Seitz, at the University of Pennsylvania, and another fellowship for about six months in 1941–1942 at the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh, he became a physics instructor at Carnegie Tech in early 1942.
Koehler supervised 7 doctoral dissertations at Carnegie Tech (now called Carnegie Mellon University) and 38 doctoral dissertations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was a faculty member from 1949 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1981. He was elected in 1949 as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. For the academic year 1956–1957, he was a Guggenheim Fellow[3] at the Cavendish Laboratory.[2]
Koehler is also known[2] for the Cooper-Koehler-Marx experiment,[4] the Magnuson-Palmer-Koehler experiment,[5] and the Bauerle-Koehler experiment.[6]
Several of Koehler's doctoral students were elected Fellows of the American Physical Society:
| Name | Year of PhD | Year of election to APS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thomas H. Blewitt | 1950 (Carnegie Tech) | 1971 | |
| Edward I. Salkowitz | 1950 (Carnegie Tech) | 1963 | |
| Johannes Weertman | 1951 (Carnegie Tech) | 1975 | |
| Abraham Sosin | 1954 (UIUC) | 1969 | |
| Ralph O. Simmons | 1957 (UIUC) | 1961 | |
| Kenneth L. Kliewer | 1964 (UIUC) | 1981 |