Robert H. Dodds Jr., the M.T. Geoffrey Yeh Chair of Civil Engineering and head of the department of civil and environmental engineering, is among 65 new members elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Dodds was cited “for contributions in non-linear fracture mechanics and applications to practice in nuclear power and space systems.”
“I’m extraordinarily grateful for the great support of the UI over the years, and that of my colleagues and friends in the department of civil and environmental engineering,” Dodds said. “I’m truly humbled by this award.”
Dodds, a UI alumnus, has been an Illinois faculty member since 1987. He was the Nathan M. Newmark Professor of Civil Engineering from 1996–2000, and in 2000, he became the inaugural holder of the M.T. Geoffrey Yeh Chair in Civil Engineering. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on structural analysis, finite element methods, fatigue and fracture mechanics and software development-design methods for civil engineering.
Dodds’ research interests focus on the field of nonlinear fracture mechanics fatigue and associated computational methods. Results of his research have wide-ranging applications in civil engineering, offshore, petro-chemical, naval and aerospace structures. He has published extensively in the areas of fracture mechanics, computational methods, and software engineering. In 1996, he became co-editor of Engineering Fracture Mechanics, a leading international journal on fracture mechanics for the past 30 years. He is an associate editor for the International Journal for Engineering with Computers and the international journal Engineering Computations. He also is a contributing editor to the International Journal for Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures, and previously served as an associate editor for ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering.
Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions in engineering.
