Kaushik Bhattacharya

Outstanding Achievement Award Recipient

College of Science and Engineering, October 19, 2018

Kaushik Bhattacharya, Howell N. Tyson Sr. Professor of Mechanics, professor of materials science, and vice provost for research at Caltech, received his bachelor’s (B.Tech) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (1986) and his PhD from the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics in the College of Science and Engineering (1991) at the University of Minnesota. He is widely considered the top researcher in the world in the area of solid mechanics. He has made extensive and seminal contributions towards the understanding of phase transformation in solids including the role of martensite in shape memory alloys and domain switching in ferroelectrics, and he also has clarified the role of twinning and texture in the deformation of such materials. In addition, he was instrumental in pioneering large-scale atomistic simulations and the non-periodic finite element formulation of the Kohn-Sham density functional theory (DFT). He is described as an excellent mentor to many students and postdoctoral scholars who have gone on to pursue academic careers in leading universities around the world as well as research and development in industry and the national labs. He served for 10 years as the co-editor-in-chief of the most prestigious journal in mechanics, Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids. Bhattacharya is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the National Young Investigator Award from NSF, Special Achievement Award in Applied Mechanics from the ASME, and the Warner T. Koiter Medal of the ASME, to name a few. He is also an elected Fellow of SIAM. Bhattacharya’s book Microstructure of Martensite (2003) trained a generation of students in the study of phase transformation and shape memory.

 

 

Biographies are as-of time of award presentation.