Brown University School of Engineering Professor Kyung-Suk Kim PhD '80 will receive the 2016 Daniel C. Drucker Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) "for seminal contributions to the field of mechanics of materials through creative research that bridges experiments and mechanics theories to understand the motion and deformation of interfaces as well as the formation and assembly of nanostructures." Professor Kim will receive his award during ASME's International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE) in Phoenix on November 15, 2016.
The Drucker Medal was established in 1997 and is conferred in recognition of distinguished contributions to the field of applied mechanics and mechanical engineering through research, teaching and service to the community. Instituted by the Applied Mechanics Division, the medal honors Dr. Daniel Drucker and commemorates his service to the profession. Drucker was an authority on the theory of plasticity in applied mechanics. He taught at Brown from 1946 until 1968 when he joined the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as Dean of Engineering. Drucker hired Kim as an assistant professor at Illinois in 1980.
Previous Brown faculty and alumni who have won the Drucker Medal include: Daniel C. Drucker (1998), George J. Dvorak Ph.D. '69 (2002), and Alan Needleman (2006).
Professor Kim has worked as an engineering scientist, inventor, and educator. His research interests are interdisciplinary - mechanics of small-scale material structures in both experiment and theoretical modeling. Through his research, he has invented numerous new scientific instruments and analytical methods, and recently initiated "ruga mechanics" in applied mechanics research. As an educator, he has developed a number of innovative course materials, and advised more than 35 PhD students and Postdocs. He is currently the Representative of the Society of Engineering Science (SES) to U.S. National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics ('16-'19). His previous recognitions include, Top 100 Science Stories of 2014 in Discover ('15), Society of Engineering Science Medal ('12), Ho-Am Prize ('05) and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award ('96).
Professor Kim received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Seoul National University of Korea in 1974 and 1976, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1980. He worked on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1980 till returning to Brown as Professor of Engineering in 1989. He has served as the director of the Center for Advanced Materials Research at Brown University since 2014.