• Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering
  • Gulf Oil/Thomas A. Dietz Career Development Professor I
  • Affiliated Faculty, Materials Science & Engineering
Dr. Marcia Cooper

Educational Background

  • Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, California Institute of Technology – 2004
  • M.S., Mechanical Engineering, California Institute of Technology – 2000
  • B.S., Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University – 1999

Research Interests

    • Behaviors of heterogeneous materials formed from densely packed granular media
    • Dynamic responses of materials in extreme environments
    • Energetic materials: ignition, shock, detonation  
    • High velocity impact
    • Laser velocimetry and high-speed optical imaging

Awards & Honors

  • SPOT Award for Leadership, Sandia National Laboratories – 2019
  • Employee Recognition Award, Sandia National Laboratories – 2011
  • Outstanding Women at Sandia National Laboratories – 2009

Selected Publications

  • Martin, S. and Cooper, M.A. (2024). The Role of Randomly Packed Particles on Macroscopic Elastic Bonded Grain Properties. Computational Particle Mechanics
  • Luke, M. and Cooper, M.A. (2023). The Effect of Particle System on Quasistatic Compression Behavior and Damage Accumulation of High Solids Loading Polymer-Particle Composites. Advanced Composite Materials
  • Cooper, M.A., Erikson, W.W. and Oliver, M.S. (2021). Electrical Conductivity in Porous Binary Powder Mixtures. Mechanics of Materials 162, 104026.
  • Cooper, M.A., Oliver, M.S., Bufford, D.C. et al. (2020). Compression Behavior of Microcrystalline Cellulose Spheres: Single Particle Compression and Confined Bulk Compression Across Regimes. Powder Technology 374, 10–21.
  • Cooper, M.A., Sapp, A.W., Guo, S. et al. (2020). Imaging Perturbed Shock Propagation in Powders. Review of Scientific Instruments 91(2), 025109.