7/10/2012 By Meredith Staub
Written by By Meredith Staub
Professor Sehitoglu receives this award in honor of his sustained excellence in graduate student mentoring, innovative approaches to graduate advising, and for having a major impact on graduate student scholarship and professional development. He will receive the award at the Celebration of Teaching Excellence on April 24 and will be featured in Inside Illinois.
“When Professor Sehitoglu’s students graduate and begin their professional careers, they are well-prepared to face research, education, mentoring, and life,” said Professor Placid Ferreira, MechSE’s department head.
Professor Sehitoglu himself was the department head from 2004 to 2009 and was instrumental in the merger of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics with Mechanical and Industrial Engineering to form the MechSE Department. He originally joined the Illinois faculty in 1983 and became a full professor in 1992. He was a Grayce Wicall Gauthier Professor from 2000 to 2004 and a C.J. Gauthier Professor from 2004 to 2008. He was invested as the first John, Alice, and Sarah Nyquist Endowed Chair in Mechanical Science and Engineering in 2008.
During his tenure at Illinois, Professor Sehitoglu has mentored 23 PhD students, 35 MS students, 25 postdoctoral associates/long-term visitors, with 8 of his PhD’s he has graduated having successfully transitioned to academic careers at peer institutions. He has teamed with his students to co-author more than 170 articles published in scholarly journals. After graduation, his students have been placed at prestigious peer institutions like Georgia Tech, Purdue, Penn State, and Texas A&M, and top federal and industrial research laboratories such as Sandia, Jet Propulsion Labs, Southwest Research Institute, GE, Exxon Mobile, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Shell, and Motorola.
His research is in the area of mechanics of materials. He is considered the foremost researcher in thermomechanical fatigue having edited publications from international symposia and prepared the well-known American Society of Metals handbook chapter on the topic. Recently, he focused on shape memory alloys and stress-induced phase transformations with modeling of twinning and slip. He is the keynote speaker in many of the conferences on these topics. Currently, he is in charge of several projects supported by the National Science Foundation, US Air Force, DOE, and Honeywell related to deformation, shape memory and fatigue in metals. He is also the Director of the Fracture Control Program (FCP). The FCP works cooperatively with industrial partners to develop models for fatigue and fracture.
Professor Sehitoglu received his Ph.D. and M.S. in theoretical and applied mechanics from Illinois after receiving a B.Sc. degree (1st Class Honors) in mechanical engineering from the City University in London. A Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers since 2003, Sehitoglu received the society's Nadai Medal in 2007 for significant contributions and outstanding achievements in the field of materials engineering. He was the Editor of ASME J. Engineering Materials and Technology from 2003 to 2008.