Zohdi named UC-Berkeley Chancellor's Professor

ICES Alumnus Tarek Zohdi has been promoted to Chancellor's Professor at The University of California, Berkeley.

Zohdi is chair of UC-Berkeley's Computational Science & Engineering Program, and professor of mechanical engineering.

Zohdi received his Ph.D. in 1997 in Computational and Applied Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin under ICES Director J. Tinsley Oden. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany from 1997 to 1998 and then a lecturer at the Gottfried Leibniz University of Hannover in Germany from 1998 to 2001, where he received received his Habilitation in General Mechanics.

In 2001 he joined the University of California, Berkeley Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2012, he was appointed Chair of the Designated Emphasis Program in Computational Science and Engineering (DE-CSE) at UC Berkeley. Previously, he served as chair of the Engineering Science Program at UC Berkeley (2008-2012) and Vice-Chair for Instruction in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (2009-2012).

Effective July 1, 2014, he was appointed as a Chancellor’s Professor at UC Berkeley.

He also holds a Staff Scientist position at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and an Adjunct Scientist position at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute.

His main research interests are in micromechanical material design, particulate flow and the mechanics of high-strength fabric, with emphasis on computational approaches for advanced manufacturing and nonconvex multiscale- multiphysics inverse problems, in particular addressing the important issue of how large numbers of micro-constituents interact to produce macroscale aggregate behavior. He has published over 110 archival refereed journal papers and five books

In 2000, he received the Zienkiewicz Prize and Medal, which are awarded once every two years, to one post-graduate researcher under the age of 35, by The Institution of Civil Engineers in London, to commemorate the work of Professor O. C. Zienkiewicz, for research which contributes most to the field of numerical methods in engineering. In 2002, he received the Best Paper of the Year Award in London, at the Lord’s Cricket Grounds, for a paper published in Engineering Computations, pertaining to modeling and simulation of the propagation of failure in particulate aggregates of material. In 2003, he received the Junior Achievement Award of the American Academy of Mechanics. The award is given once a year, to one post-graduate researcher, to recognize outstanding research during the first decade of a professional career. In 2008, he was elected Fellow of the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM) and in 2009 he was elected Fellow of the United Stated Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM). In 2011, he was selected as ”Alumnus of the Year” by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Louisiana State University (LSU), where he did his undergraduate studies.

He serves on the editorial advisory boards of ten international journals. Also, he is an editor of the leading journal Computational Mechanics and co-founder and editor-in-chief of Computational Particle Mechanics. He is also an editor of a book series on Computational Mechanics, published by John-Wiley.

He has organized or co-organized three international state-of-the-art CISM workshops (International Centre For Mechanical Sciences in 2002, 2005 and 2010) located in the Palazzo del Torso in the center of Udine, Italy, which is funded by UNESCO, the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), the International Union for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) and the European Mechanics Society (EUROMECH). In 2007, he was co-chair of the Ninth United States National Congress for Computational Mechanics, which is the largest conference in the field in the United States, and one of the largest in the world. He was elected president of the USACM in 2012, and served from 2012 to 2014. In 2009, he was elected to a six-year term as a representative of the USACM on the General Council of the IACM, which is the governing committee of the primary international organization in his field of research. In 2014, he was appointed by the United States National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council as a member of the United States National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (USNC/TAM) representing the United States Association for Computational Mechanics for a four-year term. In 2012, he was selected to be a plenary lecturer at the premier conference in his field, the 10th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2012), as well as a plenary lecturer at the European Community of Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS) Conference on Particle-Based Methods (Stuttgart, Germany, 2013). Overall, he has given more than 125 invited lectures at conferences, universities and other research institutions.