2016 Melosh Medal Winner and Finalists

The 2016 winner of the Robert J. Melosh Medal is Maruti Kumar Munuduru, with the paper “Structure-Preserving Finite Element Formulations for Advective-Diffusive-Reactive Systems.” Maruti earned a Ph.D. Degree from the University of Houston, and is currently a post-doctoral appointee at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The other five finalists in the competition were (in alphabetical order):

Miguel Arriaga (Columbia University) “Stability Analysis of Metals Capturing Brittle and Ductile Fracture through a Phase Field Method and Shear Band Localization”

Ali Vaziri Astaneh (North Carolina State University) “Efficient Forward and Inverse Algorithms for Guided Wave Inversion”

Sourish Chakravarty, (SUNY, Buffalo) “New Bounds on Tangential Constitutive Elasticity Matrix for Non-Linear Elastic Materials, a Multi-Scale Approach”

 Jiahao Cheng (The Johns Hopkins University) “A Novel Physics-Based Finite Element Model for Twinning and Deformation Heterogeneity in Polycrystalline Microstructures”

Piyush Gupta (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) “Coupled Fluid-Flow/Mechanical/Fracture Simulations of Non-Planar Three-Dimensional Hydraulic Fracture Propagation”

The judges, Prof. Sanjay Govindjee (UC Berkeley) and Wolfgang Wall (Technical University of Munich), and the host, Guglielmo Scovazzi, would like to congratulate the winner and the finalists for their outstanding performance during the competition. 

A few pictures of the award ceremony are attached.