Spotlight on Nemat-Nasser and Howell Among 10 Honorees at This Years Congress

Spotlight on Nemat-Nasser and Howell Among 10 Honorees at This Years Congress Spotlight on Nemat-Nasser and Howell Among 10 Honorees at This Years Congress Spotlight on Nemat-Nasser and Howell Among 10 Honorees at This Years CongressDr. Sia Nemat-Nasser Each year, the ASME Honors and Awards Program recognizes individuals and organizations for a variety of engineering achievements and contributions to the profession. This year, the Society will honor 10 individuals for their accomplishments at the 2013 ASME Honors Assembly to be held on Nov. 18, during the 2013 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress ausgesetztsein in San Diego, Calif.One of the evenings honorees, ASME Honorary Member and Fellow Sia Nemat-Nasser, Ph.D., will receive the Societys ASME Medal, which is the highest award that the Society can bestow. The ASME Medal, established in 1920, is awarded for eminently distinguished achievement.Dr. Nemat-Nasser , a resident of La Jolla, Calif., is a distinguished pr ofessor of mechanics and materials, and director of the Center of Excellence for Advanced Materials at the University of California, San Diego. He is being recognized for creating micro-architectured composites to mitigate shock-wave induced traumatic brain injury metamaterials to redirect, attenuate and manage stress waves and original comprehensive models of deformation and failure of metallic structures with application to metal forming and failure prevention. The award also pays tribute to Nemat-Nassers outstanding contributions in promoting ASMEs Materials Division. Nemat-Nasser is a leading scholar in the field of mechanics and has made seminal contributions to a broad range of topics including constitutive response and liquefaction in granular media brittle crack growth and bifurcation in compressive loading plasticity at large strains elastic-plastic crack tip fields failure of ductile metals under shock wave conditions overall properties of composites thermodynamics of defo rmation ionic polymer metal composites and metamaterials with novel electromagnetic or acoustic properties.An active ASME volunteer, Nemat-Nasser served as chair of the Materials Division from 1997-98, and chair of its Program and Publications and Committees in 1994-1995 and 1995-1996, respectively. Among other Society activities, he welches chair of the Applied Mechanics Divisions Geomechanics Committee from 1981-1985 and group representative for the Materials and Structures Technical Group in 1995. He received ASMEs Nadai Medal in 2002, Honorary Membership in 2005, the Robert Henry Thurston Lecture Award in 2006 and the Timoshenko Medal in 2008. In 2008, the Materials Division established the Sia Nemat-Nasser Early Career Award, which was elevated to a Society award in 2012. Dr. John Howell John Howell, Ph.D., P.E., will also be honored by ASME at the 2013 Congress. Dr. Howell, a resident of Austin, Texas, and Ernest Cockrell Jr. memorial chair emeritus at the Unive rsity of Texas at Austin, will be awarded ASME Honorary Membership during the Honors Assembly. First awarded in 1880, the founding year of the Society, Honorary Membership recognizes a lifetime of tafelgeschirr to engineering or related fields. Howell is widely considered one of the worlds pre-eminent scholars in the field of radiation heat transfer. He has a long and distinguished record of contributions as a researcher, administrator, teacher and author, and through tireless service in the engineering community. Howell began his career with the NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center in Cleveland in 1961. As an engineer in the analytical section of the Heat Transfer Branch, he carried out fundamental research, mainly in low-g boiling and radiation heat transfer in advanced propulsion systems. He decided to go into academics as the lunar program wound down and joined the faculty at the University of Houston in 1968. While at the university, he was a consultant for the NASA Johnson S pace Center.In 1978, Howell moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where he held positions including mechanical engineering department chair, director of the Center for Energy Studies, associate dean for research and director of the College of Engineerings Advanced Manufacturing Center. Since 2010, Howell has been the Ernest Cockrell Jr. memorial chair emeritus in the department of mechanical engineering. Although retired, he has continued his research with graduate students and is preparing the sixth edition of the text Thermal Radiation Heat Transfer. He also self-published three books on the history of technology.Howell is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the AIAA and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His honors include ASMEs Heat Transfer Memorial Award, NASAs Special Service Award and the American Society for Engineering Educations Ralph Coats Roe Award.The ASME Foundation is the proud supporter of the ASME Honors and Awards p rogram through the management of award endowment funds set up by individuals, corporations or groups. For more information on the 2013 Honors Assembly and all 10 of the award recipients, visit www.asmeconferences.org/Congress2013/Honors.cfm.