Professor David R. Clarke is the inaugural holder of the Extended Tarr Family Professor of Materials in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research mainly focuses on fundamentals, properties and applications of ceramics, metals, semiconductors, polymers, and thermoelectrics, especially from the mechanical properties point of view.

Professor Clarke has an extraordinary research track record of >500 scientific publications in world-leading journals, including Nature, Advanced Materials, Acta Materialia. His h-index is 107 and 10 of his papers are cited > 1000 times (total number of citations >50,000). During his +50 year professional career, Professor Clarke has held various prestigious positions in academia (Cavendish Laboratory / University of Cambridge, University of California/ Berkeley, MIT, UC Santa Barbara, Harvard University), Group Leader at Rockwell International Science Center, and also as a Senior Manager at IBM Research Division (Yorktown Heights). He has 13 patents on record.