Professor Cocks has published more than 130 technical papers and is the holder of more than 20 United States patents. He successfully flew a payload on the space shuttle and a number of his technical papers have dealt with astronautics. He received his doctoral degree from MIT in the field of metallurgy and was a postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, following which he joined Tyco laboratories in Waltham, Massachusetts, before coming to Duke in 1972. He was the principal investigator on the original Jet Propulsion Laboratory grant that led to the development of the edge-defined film-fed method of growing silicon ribbon for solar cell applications. This process is currently used to produce annually, solar cells capable of supplying more than three megawatts of solar power. In 1974 he was awarded a NASA technical achievement award for his work in the development of single crystal beta-alumina membranes for sodium-sulfur battery systems. In 1984-85 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Gordon McKay Division of Applied Physics at Harvard University. In 1999 he was a Visiting Scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany. He was the Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke from 1994-2001.