Professor Huajian Gao to Receive Nadai Medal

Brown University Professor of Engineering Huajian Gao has been selected to receive the 2015 Nadai Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for groundbreaking contributions to hierarchical nanotwinned metals, energy storage materials, metallic glasses, and diffusional creep of metal thin films. 

The award will be presented at the Materials Division Award Ceremony during the 2015 ASME Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition, November 13-19, in Houston, Texas. Gao will also deliver the Nadai Medal Lecture during the Materials Division award ceremony. 

The Nadai Medal is awarded in recognition of significant contributions and outstanding achievements which broaden the field of materials engineering. It was established in 1975 to honor Arpad L. Nadai, who was a pioneer in the field of engineering materials, contributing particularly to the area of plasticity. His perspective also enabled him to give strong impetus to development in fatigue and high temperature behavior. Previous Brown faculty and alumni that have won the Nadai Medal include: George J. Dvorak Ph.D. ’69 (1992), James R. Rice (1996), L. Ben Freund (2009), and Subra Suresh (2011). 

Professor Gao received his B.S. degree from Xian Jiaotong University of China in 1982, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering science from Harvard University in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He served on the faculty of Stanford University between 1988 and 2002, where he was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1994 and to full professor in 2000. He was appointed as Director and Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, Germany between 2001 and 2006. He joined Brown University in 2006. Professor Gao has a background in applied mechanics and engineering science. He has more than 25 years of research experience and more than 300 publications to his credit. Gao was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012. 

Professor Gao’s research group is generally interested in understanding the basic principles that control mechanical properties and behaviors of both engineering and biological systems. His research spans over solid mechanics, nanomechanics, and biomechanics. He works on mechanics of thin films and hierarchically structured materials, mechanics of biological and bio-inspired materials, mechanics of nanostructured and nanotwinned materials, mechanics of cell adhesion, mechanics of cell-nanomaterials interactions, mechanics of energy storage systems, and mechanics of metallic glasses.