On active duty he was part of Landing Craft Infantry, assigned the task of launching rockets to clear beaches for invasion in the Philippines.
Ericksen enrolled in University of Washington and was able to obtain his bachelor's degree in a year due to credits accumulated in his Navy training.
Naval Research Laboratory, was conducted by a group including Ericksen, Truesdell, William Saenz, Richard Toupin, and Ronald Rivlin.
Ericksen began to partake in the Society of Rheology and acted as a consultant to a polymer group in the National Bureau of Standards.
Ericksen became interested in anisotropic liquids and began to develop a "properly invariant theory of a fluid with a single preferred direction".
This topic attracted the interest of scientists like Bernard Coleman, James Ferguson, and Frank Matthews Leslie who were attempting to exploit liquid crystals.
When Leslie joined him at Johns Hopkins they formed a small group with post-doctoral associates to study liquid crystals.
In 1982 Ericksen moved to University of Minnesota where he took a joint appointment in the School of Mathematics and the Aerospace and Mechanics Department.
[2] He was also instrumental in the year- long program in continuum physics and partial differential equations held by the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications where Millard Beatty was a visitor.