Dr. Subra Suresh Delivered the Belytschko Lecture
Dr. Subra Suresh, President of Carnegie Mellon University, delivered the Belytschko Lecture on Thursday, September 24, at 4:00pm in the Ford ITW Room.
The Belytschko lecture honors Ted's legacy of mentorship and brilliant contributions to the field of computational mechanics. A member of Northwestern’s faculty since 1977, Belytschko was a central figure in the McCormick community and an internationally renowned researcher who made major contributions to the field of computational structural mechanics.
One of the most cited researchers in engineering science, Belytschko developed explicit finite element methods that are widely used in crashworthiness analysis and virtual prototyping in the auto industry. He received numerous honors, including membership in the US National Academy of Engineering, US National Academy of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a founding director of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, and in 2012, the association named a medal in his honor. The ASME Applied Mechanics Award was renamed the ASME Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Division Award in November 2007. Belytschko also served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering and coauthor of the books Nonlinear Finite Elements for Continua and Structures and A First Course in Finite Elements.
Many techniques that Belytschko developed throughout his career changed the way engineers design structures. Some of his greatest contributions to the field of mechanical engineering were the explicit finite element methods that have been widely used in large deformation analysis and virtual prototyping.
Dr. Subra Suresh, President of Carnegie Mellon University, delivered the Belytschko Lecture on Thursday, September 24, at 4:00pm in the Ford ITW Room. His talk is entitled “Cell mechanics in Medicine.” He discussed how advances in experimental and computational mechanics at the molecular and cell levels have played a major role in improving our understanding of human health and diseases. The lecture will provided a brief overview of some recent developments in the application of mechanics, materials science, and physics of biological cells that offer new insights for fundamental mechanistic understanding, diagnostics, and therapeutics in the context of human cancers, hereditary blood disorders and infectious diseases.
Subra Suresh is the ninth president of Carnegie Mellon University; he has served this position since July 2013.
Suresh had been director of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2010 to 2013. His many accomplishments at NSF include the creation of the Innovation Corps to support scientific entrepreneurship, and the establishment of the Global Research Council, to bring together research funders from around the world.
Prior to NSF, Suresh was dean of the School of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His pioneering research into the properties of engineered and biological materials, published in more than 300 research articles, 21 patents and three books, has shaped many disciplines at the intersections of engineering, science, and medicine.
Suresh has been elected to 14 scientific academies around the world, including the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. He is the only university president and one of only 19 living Americans to be elected to all three branches of the U.S. National Academies. He received the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science from the Franklin Institute, and was awarded the Padma Shri award by the President of India in 2011.
Suresh obtained his Bachelor of Technology degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras; Master of Science degree from Iowa State University; and Doctor of Science degree from MIT.