Huajian Gao - Curriculum Vitae#

Huajian Gao received his B.S. degree from Xian Jiaotong University of China in 1982, at the age of 18, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Science from Harvard University in 1984 and 1988, respectively. At the age of 24, he became one of the youngest faculty members at Stanford University.

After going through the academic ranks of Assistant, Associate and Full Professors at Stanford, he was recruited by the Max Planck Society of Germany to be a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in 2001. In 2006, he was recruited to Brown University, one of the most preeminent centers of Solid Mechanics, as the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Engineering. He became Walter H. Annenberg Professor Emeritus at Brown University in 2019, and one of the Distinguished University Professors at Nanyang Technological University and Scientific Director of the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore from 2006-2024. At present, he is one of the University Professors at Tsinghua University.

For his academic accomplishments and leadership roles in his field, he was elected as a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2012, a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015, a Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopodina in 2017, a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2018, a Foreign Member of Academia Europaea in 2018, a Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2023. Since 2006, he has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, the leading journal of his field. His achievements have also been recognized with numerous honors and awards, ranging from a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (for exceptional scholarship or creativity; only 1-2 awards per year in engineering) in 1995, to recent awards including the Rodney Hill Prize in Solid Mechanics from International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (the highest award in the international mechanics community; only one awardee every four years) in 2012, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (the highest German award for international scientists) in 2012, the William Prager Medal (the highest medal of Society of Engineering Science) in 2015, the Nadai Medal (the highest medal in engineering materials from American Society of Mechanical Engineers) in 2015, the Theodore von Karman Medal (the highest medal of American Society of Civil Engineers in engineering mechanics) in 2017, the Senior Distinguished Research Achievement Award from Brown University (only one award in physical sciences per year for the whole university) in 2018, the Timoshenko Medal (highest medal of ASME in applied mechanics and highest lifetime achievement international award in the field of applied mechanics) from American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 2021, the William D. Nix Award (highest award of TMS in mechanical behavior of materials) from The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS) in 2022, the Zdenek P. Bazant Medal (highest award of ASCE in failure and damage; only one award every two years) from Engineering Mechanics Institute, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2022, the Inaugural Michael P. Païdoussis Medal (highest award of RSC in applied mechanics) from the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) in 2022, the ICF George Irwin Gold Medal (highest award of ICF) from The International Congress on Fracture (ICF) in 2023 and the ASME Medal (highest honor of the society) from American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) 2023. He has been included among “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds 2015,” a list of highly cited researchers in 21 science and social science fields compiled by Thomson Reuters, in both 2015 and 2018.