Professor Robert Ritchie was born in Plymouth, England in 1948. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Metallurgy and Physics (1963), Master of Arts (1969), Doctor of Philosophy (1969) and Doctor of Science (1990). ) in Materials Science from the University of Cambridge. He is the HT & Jessie Chua Distinguished Professor in the School of Engineering, Department of Materials Science, and Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an Associate Professor at MIT (1979-1981) and a Professor at the University of Berkley from 1982. During the period 2005- 2011 he served as Chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Berkley.

He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineers (NAE), a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers (FREng) of the United Kingdom, a Foreign Fellow of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, a Fellow of of the Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a member of the European Academy of Sciences, while he has received numerous awards.

He is a world-class personality in the international field of Materials, Fracture and Fatigue Science with significant recognition of his work. He has published more than 800 scientific papers, one book and was the scientific editor of 19 books. It has more than 86,000 citations and a hit index of 113 in the Web of Science database , 124 in the Scopus database , and 145 in the Google Scholar database . During the last thirty years he has worked closely with Professors and researchers of Greek Universities, gave a series of lectures and participated in international conferences and symposia
that have been organized in Greece.