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Professor Sehitoglu received the College Faculty Mentoring Award in April 2023. Also, he received the  ICF Paul C. Paris Gold Medal, 2023, for major contributions to the complexity of fatigue failure of a broad range of materials. Professor Sehitoglu received the Honorary Membership from ASME, in 2022, for outstanding contributions to mechanical engineering and materials science, particularly in the area of fatigue of materials, and for lifelong engagement with ASME and the mechanical engineering community. Professor Sehitoglu received the prestigious TMS (The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society) Morris Cohen Award for 2022. This is considered one of the highest society awards given to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to material properties. The citation reads” for outstanding lifelong contributions to the understanding of the fatigue of metals.” The award ceremony will be held in Anaheim, California, on March 2, 2022. Prof. Sehitoglu made significant contributions to understanding the fatigue of materials with his early work on thermo-mechanical fatigue relevant to aerospace and railroad industries. Prof. Cohen at MIT worked extensively on high-strength steels widely used in railroad applications and advanced the scientific understanding of materials by transforming the field of metallurgy into materials science. Prof. Sehitoglu’s advisor, the late Prof. JoDean Morrow, from our TAM department, was an old colleague of Prof. Morris Cohen, a long-time Professor at MIT, sharing similar interests in railroad steels. Prof. Sehitoglu worked for many years on advanced modeling of stress-strain behavior and fatigue crack growth in steels (including pearlitic and bainitic alloys) and superalloys (Ni-based) relevant to the aerospace industries. These studies stood the test of time as standard references in the field. Starting in the early1990s and after his stay at the National Science Foundation, Professor Sehitoglu focused on phase transformation in metals. He built one of the unique high-pressure loading apparatus to study the effect of stress states on martensitic transformations. Then, his attention veered towards shape memory alloys, a unique set of materials that undergo shape change due to phase transformation under stress or temperature that revert to their original form when the stress or temperature is removed. NiTi is the most well-known shape memory material in stents and other biomedical applications. It is the shape memory area where he published key papers on tension-compression asymmetry, non-Schmid response, and twinning mechanics explaining many of the behaviors that puzzled other researchers. He graduated many Ph.D. students in academic positions as Professors and Department Heads in universities such as Georgia Tech., Duke, Texas A&M, Penn State, Nevada, Clemson, and Purdue in the USA, and a number of universities overseas. This is in addition to his former PhD students working as researchers in major automotive and aerospace industries.  Many of these students furthered the field with their own studies in fatigue of materials. Prof. Sehitoglu’s current work continues in the areas of fatigue and shape memory materials with special emphasis on combining ab-initio (atomistic) calculations with the nucleation of slip and migration of twins and phase boundaries.

Professor Huseyin Sehitoglu is the 2021 winner of the Tau BetaPi Daniel Drucker Award in the College of Engineering. The award citation is as follows: “This is an annual college-wide competition among distinguished faculty to recognize a faculty member of our College for dedication to academic excellence and exemplary contributions to the understanding of their field. Your extraordinary record of accomplishment, both within and beyond the boundaries of this university, persuaded us that you should receive this award.”

Professor Huseyin Sehitoglu won the 2020 Khan International Award in the Field of Plasticity.

He was honored at  International Plasticity Conference – the most well-known conference in plasticity – in January 2020 in Rivera Maya, Mexico. The award recognizes “outstanding life-long contributions in the field of plasticity primarily through research contributions.”

The criterion for selection includes 50 percent numerical input based on citations of their research papers, plus 50 percent objective input by the committee members.

Sehitoglu, who also holds the title of John, Alice and Sarah Nyquist Chair, has made important contributions to the plasticity of metals, especially on fatigue – the deterioration and failure of materials in cyclic loadings. He and his students have developed some of the most advanced theoretical models for fatigue crack initiation, and fatigue crack growth accounting for the microstructure. Recently, he has worked on an important class of shape memory materials that undergo phase transformations and recover their shape upon deformation and high entropy alloys that exhibit high strength and toughness. In addition, he has studied the role of twinning and slip and their interaction in these complex materials.