Alan Needleman, 2018 Honorary Member

Alan Needleman, Ph.D., a university distinguished professor and a TEES (Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station) distinguished research professor in the department of materials science and engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, is honored for pioneering research in the fields of computational mechanics and computational materials science.

Dr. Needleman earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1966 and his master’s degree in engineering from Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., in 1967. After completing his Ph.D. in engineering at Harvard in 1970, he spent five years in applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Brown University in Providence, R.I. Following his retirement from Brown in June 2009, he moved to the materials science and engineering department at the University of North Texas in Denton. In January 2015 he left UNT to join the Texas A&M faculty.

Dr. Needleman’s contributions include the development of a ductile fracture computational methodology, the development of cohesive surface methods for fracture analysis and the creation of a framework that enables using discrete dislocation plasticity to solve general boundary value problems.

An ASME Fellow, Dr. Needleman was a member of the Applied Mechanics Division’s Executive Committee (1995-2000; chair 2000) and served as associate editor of the Journal of Applied Mechanics (1998-2004). He received the Society’s Daniel C. Drucker Medal in 2006 and Timoshenko Medal in 2011.

Dr. Needleman is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his other honors, he received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1977 and the Society of Engineering Science’s William Prager Medal in 2006. He also holds honorary doctorates from the Technical University of Denmark and École Normale Supérieure de Cachan in France, and he is an honorary professor of Dalian University of Technology in China.

Video profile produced and written by Roger Torda and edited by Juan Yepes.

© The copyright of this program is owned by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers.