ASME honors URI mechanical engineering professor

The American Society of Mechanical Engineer’s honored University of Rhode Island professor Arun Shukla at this year’s annual International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition in Portland, Oregon. The event, which attracts leaders from academia, government and industry, is one of the largest conferences for mechanical engineers.

Shukla was invited as a 2024 plenary speaker to provide a presentation, titled Structural Response Under Extreme Underwater Loadings. He and professor Nancy R. Sottos of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign were selected for Track 12: Mechanics of Solids, Structures, & Fluids.

“The plenary talk was very well received by the audience. I felt truly honored and very thankful to the ASME for giving me this opportunity to present our work,” said Shukla. Plenary speakers play a key role in shaping the tone of an event and guiding often informative, engaging, and inspirational conversation.

Arun Shukla presents his plenary talk at the 2024 ASME Conference in Portland, OR

Following his plenary session, the ASME held a symposium to honor Shukla’s receiving the 2023 Drucker Medal, an award established in 1997 for recognition of distinguished contributions to the field of applied mechanics and mechanical engineering. The symposium featured nine invited papers by well-known speakers in the field, a few of which are Shukla’s former graduate students. “The Drucker Symposium was a humbling experience. It was wonderful to hear the leading researchers in the field making positive comments about the research conducted at URI and our contributions to the field of applied mechanics,” said Shukla.

Dinner table in counter clockwise order: Prof. Samantha Daly (UC Santa Barbara); Mrs. Vinita Shukla; Prof. Arun Shukla; Prof. Addis Kidane (Columbia University); Prof. Hareesh Tippur (Auburn University); Prof. Pradeep Guduru (Brown University); Prof. Somnath Ghosh (Johns Hopkins University); Prof. Yuri Bazilevs (Brown University); Prof. G. Ravichandran (Caltech); Prof. Vikas Srivastava (Brown University)

Shukla has mentored roughly 150 graduate students in his 43 years at URI. There are photos of the students through the years on the bulletin board outside his lab. Many of them even returned to attend his 70th birthday party celebration last year. “Working with students is what I enjoy,” said Shukla.

Shukla has made his entire career at URI. He was tenured within three years of starting, just after completing his Ph.D. and promoted to full professor four years after that. He started the Dynamic Photomechanics Laboratory from scratch. “I have seen it grow and oversaw the research I wanted to pursue,” he said. “It’s a significant point of pride.”