McDowell is the executive director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Materials, Regents' Professor and Carter N. Paden, Jr. Distinguished Chair in Metals Processing.

The prestigious and long running conference brings together delegates from around the world to discuss how to characterize, predict, and analyze the fatigue damage of structural materials.

McDowell served as a session chair for the conference, leading the discussion around Microstructure Scale Computational Modeling I with an international group of scientists and researchers. He also presented his own work regarding Microstructure-sensitive computational fatigue modeling.

He is a co-editor of the International Journal of Fatigue, dedicated entirely to the full range of scientific and technological issues associated with fatigue. The scope of the journal includes the spectrum of characterization, testing, and modeling of degradation processes under cyclic loading, commonly referred to as fatigue.

Dr. McDowell's research focuses on nonlinear constitutive models for engineering materials, including cellular metallic materials, nonlinear and time dependent fracture mechanics, finite strain inelasticity and defect field mechanics, distributed damage evolution, constitutive relations and microstructure-sensitive computational approaches to deformation and damage of heterogeneous alloys, combined computational and experimental strategies for modeling high cycle fatigue in advanced engineering alloys, atomistic simulations of dislocation nucleation and mediation at grain boundaries, multiscale computational mechanics of materials ranging from atomistics to continuum, and systems-based computational materials design.