Brown professor William A. Curtin was awarded the Distinguished Career Achievement Award on Thursday, Oct. 6, at the Multiscale Materials Modeling 10th International Conference, held in Baltimore, Md. The MMM is considered the world’s largest theoretical and computational forum on multiscale materials modeling.
Curtin was chosen “for his pioneering contributions to multiscale materials modeling from quantum to continuum scales, resulting in predictive models of mechanical behavior for industrial applications.” The award recognizes and honors an individual who has advanced the field of multiscale materials modeling through innovative, career-long research contributions. Individuals who have made a significant and lasting impact in multiscale materials modeling and who had a distinguished career of twenty years or more are eligible.
Curtin earned a combined 4-year Sc.B./Sc.M degree in physics from Brown in 1981 and his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell in 1986. He worked as staff researcher at British Petroleum until 1993, when he joined the faculty of Virginia Tech. In 1998, he returned to Brown as a professor in the solid mechanics group, and was later appointed Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor in 2006. He joined Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland as the Director of the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in 2011 and officially as professor in 2012. Now, he is rejoining Brown as professor in 2023.
His research successes include predictive theories of hydrogen storage in amorphous metals, strength and toughness of fiber composites, dynamic strain aging and ductility in lightweight aluminum and magnesium metal alloys, solute strengthening of metal alloys including high entropy alloys, and hydrogen embrittlement of metals, along with innovative multiscale modeling methods to tackle many of these problems.
Professor Curtin was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005-06, was Editor-in-Chief of Modeling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering from 2006-2016, has published over 300 journal papers that have received nearly 24,000 citations with an h-index of 82 (Google Scholar), and has been the Principal Investigator on over $36M of funded research projects.