1932–2008

Elected in 1992

“For pioneering investigations of the structure of crazes in glassy polymers and discovery of their importance in polymer fracture.”

BY WILLIAM J. WARD

ROGER KAMBOUR was a chemist at the General Electric Research and Development Center and a research professor at the University of Massachusetts. His pioneering work on crazing and fracture of glasslike thermoplastics laid the foundations for our current understanding of fracture resistance in rigid polymers.

He was born April 1, 1932, in Winchester, Massachusetts, and was raised in nearby Wilmington, 17 miles north northwest of Boston. His father was a math teacher, his mother a music teacher. He was educated at Wilmington High School (where his father was principal), Amherst College (B.A., cum laude, 1954), and the University of New Hampshire (Ph.D., 1960).

In August 1960, immediately after receiving his Ph.D., he joined General Electric’s Corporate R&D Center at Schenectady, New York, where he worked until his retirement some 34 years later. Throughout a long career, he remained dedicated to research and continued to publish articles in learned polymer journals, the last of them appearing in Macromolecules in 2000. From 1962 to 1980, his publications were almost exclusively about crazing and fracture. Thereafter, his output became more diverse; while still including occasional papers on crazing, it also covered flammability, polymer-polymer miscibility, stress relaxation, mobility of diluents, and polymerization of cyclic