Franklin Hadley Cocks, age 82, passed away at his home on July 24, 2024. Cocks was a highly regarded professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science for nearly 50 years at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.
He was born in Staten Island in 1941 and raised in Orono, Maine, along with his beloved half brother, Robert Hyslop. He earned a scholarship to MIT in part because of winning the State of Maine Science Fair in 1958 with a physics project on radiometers.
In 1963, Cocks obtained an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, continuing his studies to earn a Sc.D. in Metallurgy. Following his graduation, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in London, where he met his wife, Pamela, also a Fulbright Scholar.
After several years in Boston, Cocks and his wife moved to Durham, where he taught at Duke and raised his twin sons. During his tenure at Duke, he served as chair of the Mechanical Engineering department and created a graduate-level master of engineering management program.
In 1982, he won an award from OMNI magazine to develop and launch a science experiment on a NASA space shuttle. With his students, Dr. Cocks devised a payload to create foamed metal in space to assess the strength and reliability of such a material as a lightweight alternative to traditional building materials. The payload successfully flew on STS-40 on the Space Shuttle Columbia in June 1991.
Cocks studied during a sabbatical at the Harvard Gordon McKay Laboratory (1981), the Lucas Heights Lab of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission (1985), and the Max Planck Institute for Microstructural Physics in Halle, Germany (1999). Throughout his career, he exhibited a zeal for the intricacies of metallurgy and materials science, contributing to hundreds of published papers and the issuance of more than 25 United States patents in his name.
Cocks is survived by his loving wife of 58 years, Pamela, sons Josiah (wife Leslie Deak) of Arlington, Va., and Elijah (wife Christie Jackson) and granddaughter Evelyn and grandson Addison of Winchester, Mass. The family plans a private memorial in Durham.
