Rate My Professor Abraham Clark

Abram Henry Clark is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Duke University in 2014, focusing his dissertation research on impacts into granular materials. Prior to his appointment at NPS in 2017, initially as an Assistant Professor and later promoted to Associate Professor, Clark held a postdoctoral position at Yale University from 2014 to 2017. There, he collaborated with Professors Corey O’Hern and Nicholas Ouellette in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, studying the physics of the onset of sediment transport by overlying fluid flows. His methodological toolkit includes high-speed video analysis, discrete element simulations, molecular dynamics simulations, and photoelastic particle experiments.

Clark's research program at NPS combines computational simulations, theoretical modeling, and laboratory experiments to investigate granular flows, force transmission in granular materials, jamming and yielding transitions, acoustic properties of granular media, and complex structured fluids. He explores sediment transport across aeolian and fluvial environments and extends his work to defense applications, including adversarial swarm engagements and optimization frameworks for multi-agent systems. Affiliated with the Center for Materials Research, Clark co-leads Department of Defense-funded initiatives, such as developing playbooks and analytical tools for countering large drone swarms in collaboration with Professor Isaac Kaminer. His scholarship has amassed over 1,395 citations on Google Scholar. Key publications encompass 'Particle Scale Dynamics in Granular Impact' (Physical Review Letters, 2012), 'Nonlinear Force Propagation During Granular Impact' (Physical Review Letters, 2015), 'The Physics of Sediment Transport Initiation, Cessation, and Entrainment Across Aeolian and Fluvial Environments' (Reviews of Geophysics, 2020), 'Granular Temperature Controls Local Rheology of Vibrated Granular Flows' (Physical Review Research, 2019), and 'Frictional Weakening of Vibrated Granular Flows' (Physical Review Letters, 2023).