AUSTIN, Texas — Thomas J.R. Hughes, an innovator in computational mechanics, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States.
He was one of 72 elected nationally to the academy this year.
Hughes is a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics in the Cockrell School of Engineering and a member in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, where he holds the Applied Mathematics Chair III.
He conducts research in computational methods in solid, structural and fluid mechanics. More recently, he has developed cardiovascular modeling and simulation procedures that use patient-specific imaging data. This allows medical professionals to implement various medical interventions and make decisions based on predicted outcomes.
"Thomas Hughes, as a researcher and mentor, pushes the boundaries of computational mechanics, making way for new discoveries," said William Powers Jr., president of The University of Texas at Austin. "His international standing as an innovator in the field brings credit to our university. I congratulate him on behalf of the campus on his election to the National Academy of Sciences."
Hughes began his career as a mechanical design engineer at Grumman Aerospace, then worked at General Dynamics as a research and development engineer.
After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty. He also was at the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University before joining The University of Texas at Austin. At Stanford, he was chairman of the Division of Applied Mechanics, chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and chairman of the Division of Mechanics and Computation, and occupied the Mary and Gordon Crary Chair of Engineering.
Hughes is a fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, the International Association for Computational Mechanics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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