Professor John Rudnicki Honored by American Society of Mechanical Engineers

John Rudnicki, professor of civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering, has received the 2011 Daniel C. Drucker Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Rudnicki accepted the medal last week at the ASME 2011 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition in Denver.

The Daniel C. Drucker Medal was established in 1997 and recognizes 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.
 
The society honored Rudnicki for providing a new understanding of deformation instabilities in brittle rocks and granular media, including their interactions with pore fluids, with applications to fault instability, quantification of energy radiation from earthquakes, and environment- and resource-related geomechanics.

Rudnicki joined Northwestern in 1981 after earning a PhD from Brown University. His research interests include inelastic behavior and failure of solids, especially geomaterials and the coupling of deformation with pore fluid diffusion. In 2006, he was awarded a Maurice A. Biot Medal from the Engineering Mechanics Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers.