Dr. J.N. Reddy, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) during a ceremony Sunday (Oct. 4) in Washington, D.C. Reddy, who is a Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor and holder of the Oscar S. Wyatt Endowed Chair, was recognized for his contributions to composite structures and engineering education.
Reddy came to Texas A&M as an endowed chaired professor in 1992, bringing his passion for education and research to enrich the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is the author of nearly 500 journal papers and 18 books (several with second and third editions) on energy principles, variational methods, plates and shells, composite materials, mechanics of solids, and the finite element method and its applications. He has delivered more than 120 plenary, keynote or general invited lectures at international conferences and institutions, taught over 90 short courses, and advised 32 postdoctoral fellows and research visitors and over 100 graduate theses.
Reddy believes that learning is a self-driven process, and a teacher’s role involves more than just imparting knowledge to the students. A teacher should provide motivation to the students to learn and help in organizing their thought process to understand and develop skills necessary to be successful in professional and personal life. He firmly believes that the hallmark of a successful engineer is to have a strong grasp of fundamental concepts and a creative-thinking capability to apply the fundamental concepts of the profession or discipline to solve real-life problems. A close look at the textbooks written by Reddy show that his teaching philosophy is based on motivating students to fully understand fundamental concepts and mathematical tools necessary to formulate the problems of engineering, and developing creative and critical thinking in students so as to build solutions to real-life engineering problems. He reminds his students time and again that engineering is a “problem-solving discipline” that requires an understanding of the fundamental principles/axioms of nature and their role in formulating the underlying mathematical models. He does not compromise, as judged from his books, on mathematical rigor and physical understanding required to address the problem to be solved. This is the part that most students, even though initially a bit scared of the mathematical tools he uses to explain the physics, appreciate the most.
Reddy's research centers on theoretical formulations and numerical simulations of problems in solid and structural mechanics, composite materials, computational fluid dynamics, numerical heat transfer, geology and geophysics, and computational biology. Reddy's most significant contribution is the development of refined third-order and layer-wise plate and shell theories that bear his name in the literature. His plate and shell theories, which account for transverse shear deformation and interlaminar stresses in laminated composite materials are well-received by the composite materials and structures community all over the world and they are highly cited. The Defense Evaluation and Research Agency, DERA, Ministry of Defense of the United Kingdom contracted ABAQUS (HKS, Inc.) and Reddy as a consultant to incorporate his ideas on higher-order and layerwise theories into the software, which is used by universities as well as most structural analysis companies around the world. Reddy was the principal architect of a 3-D fluid flow finite element program based on the penalty function method in NISA finite element software, which is one of the most comprehensive engineering analysis suites available to address the automotive, aerospace, energy and power, civil, and electronics industries. His work on non-Newtonian flows was the basis of the code HyperForm (Reddy's Ph.D. student was hired by Altair, which owns the software).
Throughout his career, Reddy has earned numerous national and international awards, including: the Worcester Reed Warner Medal (1992), the Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award (1995), and the Honorary Member (2011) award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Raymond D. Mindlin Medal (2014), the Nathan M. Newmark Medal (1998), and the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize (1983) from the American Society of Civil Engineers; Award for Excellence in the Field of Composites (2000) and Distinguished Research Award (2004) from the American Society for Composites; and the Computational Solid Mechanics (2003) award from US Association for Computational Mechanics, and the IACM Award from the International Association for Computational Mechanics. He also won the AFS Award for Distinguished Achievement in Research, and Distinguished Research Award of the Sigma Xi. In 2011, Reddy was recognized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as one of its Honorary Members and Life Fellow, an honor only a few members of ASME have received. Dr. Reddy is a fellow of all major professional societies of his subject area: the American Academy of Mechanics, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Society for Composites, International Association of Computational Mechanics and the U.S. Association of Computational Mechanics, Institution of Structural Engineers, and Aeronautical Society of India.