Matthew Brake named ASME Fellow

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to Rice News

Matthew Brake, an assistant professor in Rice’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Brake joined the Rice faculty in 2016 after working for nine years at Sandia National Laboratories. He earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Matthew Brake (Photo by Doni Soward/Rice University Engineering)

At Rice, Brake’s research group is called the Tribomechadynamics Lab, a new discipline he defines as “the confluence of structural dynamics, contact mechanics and tribology.” His research focuses on how to design and predict the response of an assembled structure that contains strong nonlinearities, with applications in the aerospace, defense and automotive industries.

Brake joined Sandia in 2008 after working there as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2012, he was a visiting academic at the University of Oxford, where he helped establish a multi-institution collaboration to pioneer research in mechanical joints and interfacial mechanics.

Brake has been elected to several leadership positions within ASME, including chair of the Research Committee on the Mechanics of Jointed Structures and secretary of the Technical Committee on Vibration and Sound. Last year he received ASME’s C.D. Mote Jr. Early Career Award, which cited him for his “scholarly contributions to vibration research.”

In 2012, Brake received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers in the early stages of their research careers. He was recently elected vice chair of the Nonlinear Dynamics Technical Division of the Society of Experimental Mechanics.

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