Ravichandran Receives Murray Lecture Award

Guruswami (Ravi) Ravichandran, the John E. Goode, Jr., Professor of Aerospace and professor of mechanical engineering, and director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (GALCIT), has received the 2014 William M. Murray Award from the Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM), "for pioneering contributions in experimental mechanics of deformation, damage and failure of materials under multiaxial dynamic loading."

Ravichandran's research group explores the properties of materials ranging from biomaterials to bulk metallic glasses, adhesives, and polymers. As winner of the Murray Award, Ravichandran delivered a lecture to the SEM annual conference on June 3, 2014, titled "Three-Dimensional Quantitative Visualization: Application to Studying Cell-Matrix Interactions." The lecture will be published in a forthcoming volume of SEM's official journal, Experimental Mechanics.

"I was greatly honored to give the 2014 William M. Murray Lecture of the Society for Experimental Mechanics," says Ravichandran. "I consider this award to be a recognition of the collective work carried out by my research group (students, postdocs, and visitors) over the last 25 years in mechanics of materials. My research has benefited from the truly interdisciplinary and highly collaborative environment at Caltech, and from the appreciation and support for cutting-edge experimental work in the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (GALCIT)."

The Murray Award is the highest honor given by the SEM, the leading professional society in experimental solid mechanics. Ravichandran is currently president-elect of the society, and will be its president in 2015‑16.

Past Caltech winners of the Murray Award include Wolfgang G. Knauss (1995) and Ares J. Rosakis (2005).