Ravichandran Receives Award for Solid Mechanics

Guruswami (Ravi) Ravichandran, the John E. Goode Jr. Professor of aerospace and professor of mechanical engineering, has received the Warner T. Koiter Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

The award, established in 1996, is given annually to individuals who make distinguished contributions to the field of solid mechanics.

Ravichandran, who is also the director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), was noted for his "outstanding scientific, engineering, and mentoring contributions in the areas of ultra-high strain rate mechanics of ceramics and metals, and pioneering and innovative experiments to advance our understanding of coupled phenomena in the fields of smart materials and cellular mechanics."

"I am greatly honored to receive the Warner T. Koiter Medal from the ASME. I am pleased that my work is being recognized, but this would not be possible without the contributions of many talented students and postdoctoral scholars in my group," says Ravichandran. "I have also been very fortunate to collaborate with a number of colleagues on campus who have given me impetus to investigate interdisciplinary problems."

Ravichandran works to discover fundamental insights into the way that materials deform, are damaged, and fail. His primary aim is to develop new experimental methods to study these and other phenomena in solid mechanics.

Ravichandran received the award at the 2014 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in Montreal, in November. There he gave his 2014 Koiter Lecture, titled "Peeling of Heterogeneous Adhesive Tapes."