He will be honored at the next meeting of the International Plasticity Conference – the most well-known conference in plasticity – in January 2020, in Rivera Maya, Mexico. The award recognizes “outstanding life-long contributions in the field of plasticity primarily through research contributions.”
The criterion for selection includes 50 percent numerical input based on citations of his/her research papers, plus 50 percent objective input by the committee members.
Sehitoglu, who also holds the title of John, Alice and Sarah Nyquist Chair, has made important contributions to the plasticity of metals, especially on fatigue – the deterioration and failure of materials in cyclic loadings. He and his students have developed some of the most advanced theoretical models for fatigue crack initiation and fatigue crack growth accounting for the microstructure. Recently, he has worked on an important class of shape memory materials that undergo phase transformations and recover their shape upon deformation, and high entropy alloys which exhibit high strength and toughness. He has studied the role of twinning and slip and their interaction in these complex materials.
Sehitoglu’s research group currently includes seven graduate students, a post-doctoral researcher, and a visiting scholar. Notably, he previously won the 2007 Nadai Medal from ASME, and received an honorary doctorate degree in 2018 from Aalto University, Finland. Throughout his career at Illinois, he has supervised 31 MS and 34 PhD students, 14 are now in academic positions.