December 2, 2019

portrait of thomas hughes in officeThomas J.R. Hughes, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, received the O.C. Zienkiewicz Medal from the Polish Association for Computational Mechanics (PACM). The Medal is presented to foreign scientists “for their particular merit in the development of computational mechanics in Poland.” Hughes was presented with the Medal in Cracow, Poland on Sept. 9.

Hughes, a core faculty member of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, holds the Peter O'Donnell, Jr. Chair in Computational and Applied Mathematics. He leads the Computational Mechanics Group which includes research activities in the development of new and powerful computational methods and algorithms, fundamental mathematical investigations, and engineering and scientific applications. His research interests are in computational mechanics, isogeometric analysis, stabilized and variational multiscale methods, phase-field modeling, cardiovascular bioengineering, complex fluids, and turbulence.

Hughes has received numerous national and international awards for his research and is one of the most widely cited authors in scientific computing. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Royal Society, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere. Hughes has received honorary doctorates from A Coruña, Louvain, Pavia, Padua, Trondheim, and Northwestern.

Most recently, Hughes was once again recognized by the Web of Science Group as a 2019 Highly Cited Researcher.