ASME honors Tezduyar with Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Award

By Patrick Kurp
Special to Rice News

Tayfun Tezduyar, the James F. Barbour Professor of Mechanical Engineering, will receive the 2018 Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Award from the Applied Mechanics Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Tayfun Tezduyar

The prestigious annual prize goes to “an outstanding individual for significant contributions in the practice of engineering mechanics.” The contributions may result from innovation, research, design, leadership or education.

“For almost 30 years, this award has been given to researchers and innovators who have made a significant lifetime contribution to applied mechanics,” said Laura Schaefer, the Burton J. and Ann M. McMurtry Chair in Engineering, professor of mechanical engineering and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Tayfun’s work has had a big impact on our understanding of fluid-solid interaction, and the award demonstrates the larger community’s appreciation of that.”

Tezduyar’s research focuses on computational fluid-structure interaction (FSI), cardiovascular FSI, heart-valve computational flow analysis, spacecraft parachute FSI, bio-inspired flapping-wing aerodynamics, aerodynamics of wind turbines, thermo-fluid analysis of ground vehicles, tires and disk brakes, flow analysis of turbochargers and other turbomachinery, and aerodynamics and structural mechanics of ram-air parachutes.

Tezduyar, who joined the Rice faculty in 1998, has been elected a fellow of ASME, the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, the International Association for Computational Mechanics, the American Academy of Mechanics and the School of Engineering at University of Tokyo.

Tezduyar was named a Highly Cited Researcher in both engineering and computer science categories by Thomson Reuters in 2014, 2015 and 2016. According to Google Scholar, his publications have been cited more than 23,000 times.

The award will be presented to Tezduyar at the ASME annual meeting in Pittsburgh in November 2018.

–Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.