Hughes and six of his students highly cited researchers

Thomas J.R. Hughes, professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, and the ICES Computational and Applied Mathematics Chair III, along with six of his former PhD students were identified as highly cited researchers of 2014 by Thompson Reuters for the period 2002 through 2012. Researchers earned the distinction by writing the greatest number of papers in the top 1% in their fields during the year of publication, “earning them the mark of exceptional impact.”

Two of Hughes’s Ph.D. students who earned the distinction, Wing Kam Liu and Tayfun Tezduyar, are among his earliest and the four others, Victor Calo, Alessandro Reali, Yuri Bazilevs, and Austin Cottrell, are among his most recent.

Wing Kam Liu was Hughes’s first Ph.D. student at the California Institute of Technology, completing his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering in 1980. Liu is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. His research interests include theory and methodologies of simulation-driven science and engineering for design of nano-materials and the use of organic and inorganic materials for drug delivery and nano-medicine applications.

Tayfun Tezduyar, the James F. Barbour Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Rice University, received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology under Hughes’s supervision in 1982. Tezduyar’s research areas include computational fluid-structure interaction, spacecraft parachute modeling, cardiovascular mechanics, and flapping-wing aerodynamics.

Victor Calo, associate professor of Earth Sciences and Engineering at KAUST, received his Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University in 2005. Calo's research interests include computational geomechanics, fluid dynamics, flow in porous media, phase separation, fluid-structure interaction, solid mechanics, high-performance computing, and visualization.

Alessandro Reali is associate professor of Mechanics of Solids and Structures at the University of Pavia. Reali received his M.S. in 2004 and Ph.D. in 2005 in earthquake engineering from the European School for Advanced Studies in Reduction of Seismic Risk (ROSE School) of the Institute for Advanced Study of Pavia (IUSS-Pavia) and the University of Pavia. Hughes was Reali’s M.S. advisor and Ph.D. co-advisor at the ROSE School. Reali's research interests include isogeometric analysis, finite element methods, collocation methods, constitutive modeling, and computational biomechanics.

Yuri Bazilevs is associate professor of structural engineering at the University of California at San Diego. Bazilevs received his CSEM Ph.D. from UT in 2006. Bazilevs's research is in computational mechanics, isogeometric analysis and fluid-structure Interaction, with applications in renewable energy and biomechanics.

Austin Cottrell received his CSEM Ph.D. from UT in 2007, where his research focus was isogeometric analysis. Since 2008 he has been with Citigroup developing relative-value trading models for equity options. He is currently based in London as Citi's Lead Quantitative Analyst for Systematic Trading in Europe.

Scientists classified as highly cited have the greatest number of reports classified by Essential Science Indicators as a Highly Cited Paper. To be categorized as a Highly Cited Paper, a report must rank in the top 1 percent of most cited for their subject field and publication year. Hughes was among the most highly cited in the computer science category.

A list of Hughes' publications, as well as various citation indices, are available on his Google Scholar page.

Hughes also serves as leader of the ICES Computational Mechanics Group.