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Ted Belytschko, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Mechanical Engineering, is now the namesake of an American Society of Mechanical Engineers award. The society’s Applied Mechanics Division Award was renamed the Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Award at the society’s Honors and Awards Banquet on Nov. 13.

The award will be given annually to an outstanding individual for significant contributions in the practice of engineering mechanics, whether it’s through innovation, research, design, leadership or education. It includes a $1,500 check, a plaque, and travel expenses to the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition meeting. The award is funded by a $100,000 endowment which was contributed by his former students, friends and software firms.

Belytschko pioneered explicit finite element methods, which have dramatically altered industrial practice in design, particularly crashworthiness design, by replacing prototype testing by computer simulation. Recently he has developed new meshfree methods and the extended finite element method for simulating arbitrary crack growth. These are already being implemented in industrial software. He is one of the most highly cited researchers in his field, with over 11,000 citations.

Belytschko is editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering.

ASME is a professional organization that promotes mechanical and multidisciplinary engineering and allied sciences throughout the world. The society’s Division of Applied Mechanics fosters the intelligent use of mechanics by engineers and works to develop the area to serve the engineering community needs.

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