Martin Ostoja-Starzewski, a professor of mechanical science and engineering and a member of the Beckman Institute's Computational Imaging Group, was awarded the 2018 Worcester Reed Warner Medal from ASME during a ceremony at ASME’s International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition this week in Pittsburgh.
“I am truly humbled and honored to receive such a distinguished award,” said Ostoja-Starzewski, who received the award for his book, “Microstructural Randomness and Scaling in Mechanics of Materials.” The medal is awarded annually to an individual for outstanding contribution to the permanent literature of engineering for literature that is at least 5 years old. Contributions may be single papers, treatises or books, or a series of papers that promote progressive ideas relating to research in mechanical engineering. With the medal, he joins a long list of pre-eminent American engineering researchers, going back to 1933.
The book, published in 2008 by Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, introduces a wide range of stochastic models and methods (such as random geometry and random fields) used in the mechanics (both statics and dynamics) of random heterogeneous media and illustrates these in a variety of applications. The latter include the disordered lattice models, classical and micropolar planar elasticity, passage from a microstructure to generalized continua, definition of a statistical volume element (SVE), scaling from SVE to a representative volume element (RVE) level in elastic and inelastic materials, first-ever micromechanically-based stochastic finite elements, stochastic formulation of thermomechanics with internal variables, and waves in random media.
Overall, it is the first book treating the issues of scaling to representative volume element (RVE) as well as the size of RVE in elastic and inelastic materials, also introducing the statistical volume element (SVE).
Ostoja-Starzewski’s research interests are in the mechanics and physics of random and fractal media, continuum physics theories, helices, electromagnetic shielding, spontaneous nanoscale violations of the second law of thermodynamics, tensor random fields, and multifarious applications beyond mechanical engineering: in aerospace, biomechanics, and geophysics.
At Beckman, he does research on MRI-based modeling of mild-traumatic brain injury in collaboration with Brad Sutton and Arundhati Biswas. Since 2014, he has been site co-director of an NSF IUCRC, the Center for Novel High Voltage/Temperature Materials and Structures.
