The Eshelby Mechanics Award for Young Faculty, launched in 2012, is given annually to rapidly emerging junior faculty who exemplify the creative use and development of mechanics. [1] The intent of the award is to promote the field of mechanics, especially among young researchers, and commemorate the memory of Professor John Douglas Eshelby. While interdisciplinary work that bridges mechanics with physics, chemistry, biology and other disciplines is encouraged, the ideal awardee will demonstrate clear inspiration from mechanics in his or her research. Awardees receive a $1,500 cash prize and a commemorative plaque. The awardees are formally recognized at the annual Applied Mechanics Division banquet at the ASME-IMECE meeting. [2]
Nominees must be in a tenured or tenure-track faculty position or an independent researcher in a national laboratory and not have reached their 41st birthday by December 31 of the year of the awards presentation. Nominators must fill out the nomination form and provide a letter of recommendation for the nominee along with two letters of recommendation from two other researchers. The nomination packet must also include a detailed curriculum vitae for the nominee. Nominations and recommendation letters from Ph.D. and post-doctoral advisors are discouraged.
The selection committee consists of five prominent mechanicians who are editors or editorial board members of mechanics journals. The composition of the selection committee includes:
The selection committee is completely autonomous and its decision is final. Pradeep Sharma [17] of University of Houston, Associate Editor of the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids serves as the secretary for the award (2012–present). The secretary does not participate in the award decisions, and his or her role is to advertise the award and collect the nominations.
Huajian Gao is a Chinese-American mechanician who is widely known for his contributions to the field of solid mechanics, particularly on the micro- and nanomechanics of thin films, hierarchically structured materials, and cell-nanomaterial interactions. He is a Distinguished University Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and Walter H. Annenberg Professor Emeritus of Engineering at Brown University. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.
The Timoshenko Medal is an award given annually by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) to an individual "in recognition of distinguished contributions to the field of applied mechanics."
The Warner T. Koiter Medal was established in 1996 by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It is awarded in recognition of distinguished work in the field of solid mechanics.
John Douglas Eshelby FRS was a scientist in micromechanics. He made significant contributions to the fields of defect mechanics and micromechanics of inhomogeneous solids for fifty years, including important aspects of the controlling mechanisms of plastic deformation and fracture.
The Applied Mechanics Division (AMD) is a division in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The AMD was founded in 1927, with Stephen Timoshenko being the first chair. The current AMD membership is over 5000, out of about 90,000 members of the ASME. AMD is the largest of the six divisions in the ASME Basic Engineering Technical Group.
Roddam Narasimha FRS was an Indian aerospace scientist and fluid dynamicist. He was a professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science (1962–1999), director of the National Aerospace Laboratories (1984–1993) and the chairman of the Engineering Mechanics Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. He was the DST Year-of-Science Chair Professor at JNCASR and concurrently held the Pratt & Whitney Chair in Science and Engineering at the University of Hyderabad. Narasimha was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian award, in 2013. for his contributions to advance India's aerospace technology.
Daniel Charles Drucker was American civil and mechanical engineer and academic, who served as president of the Society for Experimental Stress Analysis in 1960–1961, as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in the year 1973–74, and as president of the American Academy of Mechanics in 1981–82.
Ares J. Rosakis, Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He was also the fifth Director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, known as (GALCIT), and formerly known as Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, and was the Otis Booth Leadership Chair, of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science.
Yonggang Huang is the Jan and Marcia Achenbach Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University.
Zhigang Suo is the Allen E. and Marilyn M. Puckett Professor of Mechanics and Materials in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research centers on the mechanical behavior of materials and structures.
Ramarathnam Narasimhan is an Indian materials engineer and a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science. He is known for his pioneering researches on fracture mechanics and is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 1999.
Guruswami Ravichandran is a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. He is also serving as the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech. He served as the director of Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) at California Institute of Technology from 2009 to 2015. He was named Fellow of the Society for Experimental Mechanics in 2010 and served as the President of the Society for Experimental Mechanics from 2015 to 2016.
Yongjie Jessica Zhang is an American mechanical engineer. She is the George Tallman Ladd and Florence Barrett Ladd Professor of mechanical engineering and, by courtesy, of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Engineering with Computers.
Julia Rosolovsky Greer is a materials scientist and is the Ruben F. and Donna Mettler Professor of Materials Science, Mechanics and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). As of 2019, Greer is also the director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech.
Nadia Lapusta is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. She designed the first computational model that could accurately and efficiently simulate sequence of earthquakes and interseismic slow deformation on a planar fault in a single consistent physical framework.
Xie Chen is a Chinese physicist and a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. Her work covers both the field of condensed matter physics and quantum information, with a focus on many-body quantum mechanical systems with unconventional emergent phenomena. She won the 2020 New Horizons in Physics Prize for "incisive contributions to the understanding of topological states of matter and the relationships between them"
Katherine T. Faber is an American materials scientist and one of the world's foremost experts in continuum mechanics, ceramic engineering, and material strengthening. Faber is the Simon Ramo Professor of Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Currently, Faber is the faculty representative for the Materials Science option at Caltech. She is also an adjunct professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.
Samantha (Sam) Hayes Daly is an American mechanical engineer whose research topics include the failure analysis of novel materials including shape-memory alloys and ceramic matrix composites, and the calibration of the scanning electron microscopes used in this analysis. She is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.