Voyiadjis Elected a Senior Member of National Academy of Inventors
February 11, 2021
BATON ROUGE, LA – Boyd Professor and Chair of the LSU Department of Civil & Environmental
Engineering George Voyiadjis has been elected a senior member of the National Academy
of Inventors.
This year’s class is comprised of 61 accomplished academic inventors representing 36 research universities, governmental entities and non-profit institutes worldwide.
The NAI Senior Member program is an exclusive award distinction created to showcase the innovative ecosystems at NAI member institutions, like LSU, which provide the supportive environment to foster novel discoveries. Senior members are chosen from active faculty, scientists, and administrators with success in patents, licensing, and commercialization who have produced technologies that have the potential for a real impact on the welfare of society.
“I am thrilled by this honor, as it further recognizes the adoption of these patent designs as a potential solution to extending the safe life-span of our aging bridge infrastructure, and with extension to any number of applications involving damage protection due to impact,” Voyiadjis said. “They have the potential for providing safety improvement solutions throughout the engineering community.”
Voyiadjis began his career at LSU in 1980 as an assistant professor after working at the California Institute of Technology, where he earned his master’s in civil engineering, and Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in engineering mechanics. His primary research interests are in plasticity and the damage mechanics of metals, metal matrix composites, polymers, biological tissue, and ceramics with an emphasis on the theoretical modeling, numerical simulation of material behavior, and experimental correlation.
Voyiadjis has been recognized for his contributions to materials by being inducted to the Academia Europaea—Physics & Engineering Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences. He is also a Foreign Member of both the Polish Academy of Sciences, Division IV (Technical Sciences), and the National Academy of Engineering of Korea. He was also instrumental in LSU joining a consortium of universities and research centers that includes the University Carlos III of Madrid, the National Engineering School of Metz, the Polytechnic University of Poznan, and the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Each year, the consortium organizes an international workshop devoted to the behavior of materials.
Over the last decade, Voyiadjis has helped LSU establish additional relationships with international institutions. In 2009, an exchange agreement with Ecole Nationale d’Ingenieurs in Metz, France, was made. The agreement included the exchange of faculty, research, graduate students, training, and internships. A common project also developed between LSU and ENIM-LaBPS that mainly concerned the friction definition at high-applied velocity. Analytical models have been developed at LSU and experiments performed at ENIM, with the work being presented at conferences and published in journals. New projects have been proposed related to the characterization and modeling of the microstructural behavior of materials using nano-indentation experiments and computational simulations.
Another collaboration began in 2009 when students from LSU travelled to the University of Lorraine in France to conduct high-impact experiments at the National Engineering School of Metz, now a department at UL. A number of joint-journal papers and conferences between the two followed, and, during UL Professor Alexis Rusinek’s last visits to LSU, a new lab called MATEX, or Materials Under Extreme Loading Laboratory, was initiated here that allows for the study of the behavior of materials at high-impact loads.
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Contact: Joshua Duplechain
Director of Communications