Brown professor William A. Curtin has rejoined the School of Engineering faculty, after serving as a visiting faculty member in the fall, and coming from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. At EPFL, he served as the Director of the Institute of Mechanical Engineering from 2011-2015, and as professor since 2012. Prior to that, he was part of Brown’s Division of Engineering from 1998-2011. Effective January 1, 2023, he has returned to the Brown School of Engineering as professor.
Curtin was awarded the Distinguished Career Achievement Award this fall at the Multiscale Materials Modeling 10th International Conference, an award that recognizes and honors an individual who has advanced the field of multiscale materials modeling through innovative, career-long research contributions. The MMM is considered the world’s largest theoretical and computational forum on multiscale materials modeling.
He 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 before departing for Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in 2011.
His research successes are primarily in the area of materials for energy-efficient transportation and generation. These include predictive theories of 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 over 24,000 citations with an h-index of 84 (Google Scholar), and has been the Principal Investigator on over $36M of funded research projects.