Kyung-Suk Kim, Professor of Engineering at Brown University, has been selected to deliver the Society of Experimental Mechanics' William M. Murray Lecture. Given annually, the lecture is presented each year in honor of Dr. William MacGregor Murray who was the first SEM president and longtime secretary-treasurer.
Kim is a member of the solids and structures group at Brown, and directs the Nano and Micromechanics Laboratory. He is also the Director of the Center for Advanced Materials Research. He was selected for "distinguished contributions to the invention and development of many experimental techniques to reveal the material behavior at the micro- and nano-length scales."
Kim's research interests are in scale-bridging mechanics, and nano and micromechanics of solids. Through his research on dynamic properties of solids, adhesion and friction, ruga mechanics of soft materials and stability of nanostructures, he has invented numerous new scientific instruments, including various interferometers, and analytical methods. He has advised more than 39 Ph.D. students and postdocs. Kim has received various awards including the Melville medal (1981), the Drucker Medal from American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2016), the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Ho-Am Prize in Engineering (2005), the Kwan-Ak Distinguished Alumni Award of Seoul National University (2012), and the Engineering Science Medal from the Society of Engineering Science (2012). His research on "New Math for Designer Wrinkles" was selected as one (#30) of the Top 100 Science Stories in Discover Magazine in 2015.
He received his Ph.D. (1980) in Solid Mechanics from Brown, and taught in the Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Department, University of Illinois-Champaign for nine years until returning to Brown as Professor of Engineering in 1989. He has also held visiting faculty positions at Harvard University (1987, 1988 and 2002), Cambridge University, U.K. (1996) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (1997). He served as board member of the Society of Engineering Science (SES) from 2012-2015, and was the representative of the SES to the U.S. National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from 2016-2018.
The Murray Lecture, established in 1952, is one of the society's highest honors. Two other Brown faculty have also been chosen to give the lecture: Daniel C. Drucker (1967) and Rodney J. Clifton (1997). Kim will deliver the 2019 Murray Lecture on June 4 at the SEM Annual Conference in Reno, Nevada.