Bažant Wins Royal Society of Canada’s Paidoussis Medal
The honor is for outstanding contributions to research, education, and leadership in applied mechanics
Northwestern Engineering’s Zdeněk P. Bažant has won the Michael P. Paidoussis Medal from the Royal Society of Canada (RSC).
Bažant, McCormick Institute Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering, earned the honor for his outstanding contributions to research, education, and leadership in applied mechanics. Among engineers, he is well-known for his definitive analyses of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, and of the excessive deflection and subsequent tragic collapse of the Koror-Babeldaob Bridge of record span in Palau in 1996.
He has made a number of lasting contributions to solid mechanics, the most impactful being the Bažant size effect law, the crack band model, the microplane constitutive law, the gap test, the AAEM method for aging creep effects in concrete structures, the proof of expansiveness of cement hydration on porous material scale despite contractiveness on nanoscale, the thermodynamics of adsorption role in creep, statistical sorption isotherm for the filling of nanopores, the effect of crack-parallel stress on fracture of hard and soft materials, and more.