March 24, 2015
Professor Krishnaswamy Ravi-Chandar of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin has been selected to receive the prestigious 2015 Daniel C. Drucker Medal. Instituted by the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME, the Drucker medal is conferred in recognition of distinguished contributions to the field of applied mechanics and mechanical engineering through research, teaching and service to the community over a substantial period of time. Ravi-Chandar was selected “for seminal contributions to the understanding of dynamic fracture and failure of solids.”
The award, which commemorates Dr. Daniel Drucker and his service to the profession, consists of a $2,000 honorarium, a bronze medal and a certificate. ASME will formally present the award to Ravi-Chandar at the Applied Mechanics Dinner during the ASME Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition to be held in Houston, Texas, November 13-19, 2015.
Ravi-Chandar’s research interests lie in the general area of mechanical behavior of solids with a particular emphasis on fracture and failure behavior. His current thrusts are in the areas of dynamic fracture, fragmentation, ductile failure in structural materials, inelastic behavior of polymers and composites, and nonlinear wave propagation. While interest in these problems is motivated by their enormous practical importance, the focus of the research is on the generation of a fundamental understanding of the way in which materials deform and fail. This requires a well-integrated experimental and theoretical study, conducted at various spatial and temporal resolution. Accordingly, Ravi-Chandar’s research laboratory facility is geared toward performing experiments specially designed to elucidate these characteristics of material behavior. He is the author of one book Dynamic Fracture (Elsevier, 2004) and more than 150 archival journal articles.
Ravi-Chandar joined the Cockrell School of Engineering in the Fall 2000 semester. Prior to that, he was a faculty member at the University of Houston for seventeen years. He currently holds the Temple Foundation Endowed Professorship #1 and serves as Associate Director of the Center for Mechanics of Solids, Structures, and Materials (CMSSM). Since 2000, he has also served as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Fracture.
