Romesh C. Batra receives Alumni Award for Excellence in Research
Romesh C. Batra, of Blacksburg, the Clifton C. Garvin Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, received a 2004 Alumni Award for Excellence in Research.
The Alumni Association established the Alumni Award for Research Excellence to recognize faculty who have made outstanding contributions in research. Alumni, students, faculty, and staff members nominate faculty for the award. The selection committee is composed of a chair appointed by the vice president for research and previous faculty recipients of the award.
Batra's research has helped scientists and engineers understand how materials fail when they are sheared, e.g., as could happen during a catastrophic natural disaster or a terrorist event. While the brittle fracture of metallic structures has been well understood for some time, many failures occur only after a material has been significantly deformed and contains multiple cracks.
In the mid-80s, researchers began to notice the presence of these bands occurs before the ductile failure of a material that has been subjected to sudden large shock loads, such as those induced by a blast. Soon thereafter, Batra began an exhaustive study of these bands, and long before coming to Virginia Tech. While his current research continues to advance the status of knowledge in this field, his studies will contribute to the design of structures that are resistant to explosions and hurricanes.
Batra, originally from Shahabad Markanda, District Karnal, India, earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Panjabi University, Patiala, India, and a master’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He earned a Ph.D. in mechanics and materials science from The Johns Hopkins University and worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Hopkins for a year and at the McMaster University in Canada for a year. He came to Virginia Tech in 1994 as the Clifton C. Garvin Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics.
Batra has received a Humboldt Award to the Technical University of Berlin and the Eric Reissner Medal from the International Society of Computational Engineering Science. He was named to membership on the National Research Council’s (NRC) panel on Armor and Armaments and the NRC’s panel on Survivability and Lethality Directorate. He also earned the grade of fellow in the ASME, the SES, the American Academy of Mechanics, and the American Society of Engineering Education. He also received the Jai Krishna Award from the Indian Society of Earthquake Engineering. He is listed in Who’s Who in America.
Batra has served as president of the Society of Engineering Sciences and chair of the Elasticity Committee of the Applied Mechanics Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He was an associate technical editor of the ASME’s Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology and co-founded the journal Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids, which he co-edits. He is an editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computational Methods and has served on the editorial boards of several other professional publications.
The College of Engineering at Virginia Tech is internationally recognized for its excellence in 14 engineering disciplines and computer science. The college’s 5,600 undergraduates benefit from an innovative curriculum that provides a "hands-on, minds-on" approach to engineering education, complementing classroom instruction with two unique design-and-build facilities and a strong Cooperative Education Program. With more than 50 research centers and numerous laboratories, the college offers its 2,000 graduate students opportunities in advanced fields of study such as biomedical engineering, state-of-the-art microelectronics, and nanotechnology.
Founded in 1872 as a land-grant college, Virginia Tech has grown to become among the largest universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Today, Virginia Tech’s eight colleges are dedicated to putting knowledge to work through teaching, research, and outreach activities and to fulfilling its vision to be among the top research universities in the nation. At its 2,600-acre main campus located in Blacksburg and other campus centers in Northern Virginia, Southwest Virginia, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Roanoke, Virginia Tech enrolls more than 28,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries in 180 academic degree programs.
