Alan Needleman

Professor, Department of Materials Science & Engineering
Texas A&M University
Email: Email: needle@tamu.edu

Alan Needleman received his B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and finished his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1970. He then spent five years in Applied Mathematics at MIT before moving to Brown University where he served as Dean of the Engineering from 1988 to 1991 and became Florence Pirce Grant University Professor in 1996. He retired from Brown in 2009 and moved to the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of North Texas. In 2015 he joined Texas A&M University where he is a University Distinguished Professor and a TEES Eminent Research Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. His contributions include the development of a ductile fracture computational methodology, the development of cohesive surface methods for fracture analysis and the creation of a framework that enables using discrete dislocation plasticity to solve general boundary value problems. Professor Needleman is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and an Honorary Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He was awarded the Prager Medal by the Society of Engineering Science, and the Drucker and Timoshenko Medals by ASME. He also holds honorary doctorates from the Technical University of Denmark and Ecole Normale Superior de Cachan (France), and is an Honorary Professor of Dalian University of Technology (China). Professor Needleman was recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as a highly cited author both in Engineering and in Materials Science. On Google Scholar his publications have been cited over 41000 times.