John Dorn was born April 10, 1909 in Chicago, Illinois. He received his BS (1931) and MS (1932) degrees from Northwestern University in Chemistry and his PhD (1936) in Physical Chemistry at the University of Minnesota. He spent the next two years at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. John Dorn then became a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley where he spent the rest of his career in the field of physical metallurgy. At Berkeley he was known as an outstanding teacher as well as a superb research scientist. Although trained in chemistry he set upon the path from chemistry to metallurgy well traveled by many outstanding metallurgists of the 20s, 30s and 40s.

He became the most distinguished and well-known metallurgical alum of Northwestern. In the late 1950s he helped his old Alma Mater, and our then very small department, become one the first three schools in the Nation granted by DOD a very well funded Materials Research Center. This boost set our department on its way to its present stature.

John Dorn was particularly famous for his work on the high temperature creep of metals. He and his best-known student, Oleg Sherby, established that the activation energy of high temperature creep and the activation energy of self diffusion are the same. Professor Sherby inaugurated the first Dorn lecture in 1974.

John Dorn authored or coauthored 180 research papers. His honors include the ASTM Charles Dudley Medal (1958), the ASM Howe Medal (1959), the ASTM Gillette lectureship (1962), and the Albert Easton White Distinguished Teacher Award of the ASM (1964). John Dorn was elected a Medallion Member of the Honeur Société Francaise de Metallurgie in 1968. Suffering from a heart condition and lung cancer, John Dorn died on September 24, 1971 at age 62 in the same year he received an honorary PhD from Northwestern