Professor Bowman joined the faculty as Assistant Professor at Purdue University in 1988 after receiving degrees in Metallurgy and Materials Science from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), (B.S. 1981, M.S. 1983) and Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1987). He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1992, and then promoted to Professor in 1996. Keith Bowman has served as a visiting professor and received Alexander von Humboldt Research Awards at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany in 1996 and again in 2002. He served as a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia in 2003. In 2005-06 he served a one year appointment as Acting Head of the Purdue School of Materials Engineering while Alex King was on leave with the US State Department.  Professor Bowman was named a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society in 2000 and has held several division and society-wide positions in the Society. Awards at Purdue University include the Purdue Materials Engineering Best Teaching Award in 1992 and 1995 and Purdue's highest teaching award, the Charles Murphy Undergraduate Teaching Award in 1995. In 2003 Professor Bowman's name was added to the Purdue Book of Great Teachers. In 2007 he received The Purdue College of Engineering Mentoring Award.  Professor Bowman is a member of the College of Engineering Finance Team and the Diversity Action Committee. He completed a one-year appointment as Chair of the Diversity Action Committee this past summer.
 
Professor Bowman has served as advisor or co-advisor to twenty master's and twenty-one doctoral students. His research group has led efforts to quantify and assess processing effects, preferred orientation and property anisotropy in metals, ceramics, composites and pharmaceutical materials with a particular emphasis on mechanical and electromechanical properties, including elasticity, strength, fatigue resistance, fracture behavior and ferroelasticity. Professor Bowman has given research presentations in eighteen countries. Professor Bowman has over 120 publications in print and is the author of a textbook "An Introduction to Mechanical Behavior of Materials" (Wiley, 2004).