Membership

The present membership of about 1,400 is sufficiently small that the Society is able to respond quickly to their needs. The Society brings together a broad spectrum of individuals from academic, industrial, and governmental organizations whose interests include experimental methods, constitutive equations, material processing, flow of non-Newtonian fluids, mechanical behavior of solids, and theoretical and applied mechanics. Materials of interest include, among many others, polymers, paints, foods, biological fluids, and petroleum production fluids. The approach ranges from mathematical theory to industrial practice. A primary objective of the Society is to facilitate communication among rheologists interested in a wide variety of materials; between engineers and academics; between theoreticians and experimentalists.

The Society is a member of the American Institute of Physics, and The International Committee on Rheology , which organizes the International Congress on Rheology, held every four years. The Society is also affiliated with the U.S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics .

The Annual Meeting of the Society is normally held in mid-October. This meeting attracts ~500 participants and is designed to promote interactions between rheologists interested in different materials and in taking different approaches to solving rheological problems. There are normally no more than six simultaneous sessions, and the program includes plenary lectures, special symposia, informal evening discussions, and instrument exhibits. A banquet is held to honor the recipients of the Society’s awards: the Bingham Medal, the Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award, the Journal of Rheology Publication Award, and the Distinguished Service Award, all for outstanding contributions to rheology. Elected SoR Fellows of the year are also recognized at the banquet. The Annual Meeting for those years during which an International Congress on Rheology occurs (2016, 2020, 2023, 2027 etc.) is held early in the following year (except when the ICR is held in the United States). The program and abstracts for the Annual Meeting are published and available online.

All members have access to the Journal of Rheology, published six times per year, is the archive publication of the Society and evolved from the Transactions of The Society of Rheology, which first appeared as an annual publication in 1957. The Journal maintains a high standard of quality and endeavors to carry out its review process with minimum delay. Members also receive the Rheology Bulletin, published 1-2 times per year, which carries news of Society activities and other items of interest to rheologists. As affiliate members of AIP, all SoR members also receive Physics Today .