Mar 27, 2015 | No Comments | By Sarah Preis
We are pleased to announce that HEMI Director Professor K.T. Ramesh is the recipient of the 2015 William M. Murray Medal. The award recognizes his sustained and distinguished technical contributions to the field of experimental mechanics and is awarded to him for his major impact on our understanding of nanomaterials and dynamic failure processes.
The William M. Murray Lecture was initiated in 1952 as the prestige lecture for the Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM). It is presented each year as a continuing honor to Dr. William MacGregor Murray, first president and long-time secretary-treasurer, for his many contributions to SEM. The lecturer receives a medal bearing the likeness of W.M. Murray, and the lecture is published in the journal Experimental Mechanics without review.
Professor Ramesh is the third member of the Mechanical Engineering Department to receive this honor. The late Professor James Bell gave the lecture in 1989 and emeritus Professor William N. Sharpe, Jr., who gave the lecture in 2002. “Professor Ramesh continues the long tradition of experimental mechanics at Hopkins,” comments Sharpe.
Ramesh’s selection is a well-deserved public statement by his professional peers of the quality and impact of the many notable contributions that he has made over the course of a richly-productive career. He is the Alonzo G. Decker Jr. Professor of Science and Engineering and his research interests are in high strain rate behavior and dynamic failure of materials, nanostructured materials, injury biomechanics and planetary scale impact problems. Professor Ramesh received his doctorate from Brown University in 1987 and continued his education as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego. He joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins in 1988 and served as Department Chair from 1999-2002. He has served as founding Director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI) since 2012. He has published one book (Nanomaterials: Mechanics and Mechanisms; Springer) and is an avid amateur astronomer.
“K.T. isn’t simply a top-flight experimental mechanician who knows how to develop models, nor is he a theoretician who knows how to conduct experiments,” says Professor Lori Graham-Brady, Assistant Director of HEMI. “He has the rare ability to excel in both, providing a key link between the experiments that help us understand materials and the models that attempt to predict their behavior.”
The formal presentation of the 2015 Murray Medal will take place immediately following the delivery of the Ramesh’s Murray lecture, “Dynamics Across the Scales: Rocks, Shocks and Asteroids,” on the morning of Tuesday, June 9, 2015 during the SEM Annual Conference and Exposition on Experimental and Applied Mechanics.
