Huajian Gao, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Engineering at Brown University, has been elected as a member of Academia Europaea. Gao is one of 302 international scholars invited to accept membership in the four classes of humanities, social and related sciences, exact sciences, and life sciences, following a rigorous peer review process.
The Academia Europaea was founded in 1988, on the initiative of the UK's Royal Society and other National Academies in Europe. Academia Europaea is the only Europe-wide Academy with individual membership of over 3800 eminent scholars from Europe and other nations across the world, covering the full range of academic disciplines.
Gao has been honored by several professional societies for his work. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He is also the recipient of the highest societal honors from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Society of Engineering Science, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Professor Gao received his B.S. degree from Xian Jiaotong University of China in 1982, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering science from Harvard University in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He served on the faculty of Stanford University between 1988 and 2002, where he was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1994 and to full professor in 2000. Gao was Director and Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, Germany, between 2001 and 2006. He joined the Brown University faculty in 2006.
He has more than 30 years of research experience and more than 400 publications to his credit, which have been cited by other researchers more than 37,000 times. Professor Gao's research is generally focused in understanding the basic principles that control mechanical properties and behaviors of both engineering and biological systems, and spans solid mechanics, nanomechanics, and biomechanics. He works on mechanics of thin films and hierarchically structured materials, mechanics of biological and bio-inspired materials, mechanics of nanostructured and nanotwinned materials, mechanics of cell adhesion, mechanics of cell-nanomaterials interactions, mechanics of energy storage systems, and mechanics of metallic glasses