Sehitoglu awarded for contributions to fatigue failure research

Professor Huseyin Sehitoglu has been named the 2023 recipient of the Paul C. Paris Gold Medal from the International Congress on Fracture (ICF).

He was honored for his major contributions on the complexity of fatigue failure of a broad range of materials. He will officially receive the award next week at the 15^th International Conference on Fracture in Atlanta, Georgia.  The International Congress on Fracture is a premier international organization promoting worldwide cooperation among scientists and engineers dealing with mechanics and mechanisms of fracture and strength of solids.

Sehitoglu, the John, Alice and Sarah Nyquist Chair in MechSE, has won a slate of honors in just the last several years for his achievements in the field of materials fracture and the mechanics of fatigue – including 2022 ASME Honorary Membership, 2022 TMS Morris Cohen Award, 2021 Tau Beta Pi Daniel Drucker Award from The Grainger College of Engineering, and the 2020 Khan International Award in the Field of Plasticity – to name a few.   

Sehitoglu leads the High Temperature Materials Laboratory and heads the Fracture Control Program at Illinois and is currently involved with NSF, Air Force, DOE, Rolls Royce and Honeywell funded research.  His major areas of focus are mechanics of materials, thermo-mechanical behavior of metals, phase transformations and shape memory, and twinning and slip in metallic materials.

The ICF symposium was, in part, held in honor of the late MechSE Professor Emeritus JoDean Morrow. The retired TAM professor was known throughout the world for introducing the strain approach to fatigue and was widely recognized for his work in low-cycle fatigue and for his pioneering leadership in the development of useful design criteria for mechanical components subjected to fatigue damage. His efforts within the former TAM Department helped establish the first servo-hydraulic fatigue-testing facility in Talbot Laboratory, which has since become one of the most prestigious research laboratories in the country for materials testing. Many of Morrow's graduate students went on to pursue academic careers, including three MechSE faculty: Sehitoglu, Darrell Socie and Peter Kurath. Morrow and his students were such leaders in the area of the strain approach to fatigue that others in the field fondly referred to them as the "Illinois mafia."