The Executive Committee of the ASCE Board of Direction approved the list of recipients of several prestigious 2026 Society awards administered by the Engineering Mechanics Institute. Many of these awards will be presented on June 4th during the EMI 2026 Conference in Boulder, Colorado.
Congratulations to all the award recipients!
Jack E. Cermak Medal
Held jointly with the Structural Engineering Institute of ASCE
Kurtis R. Gurley, Ph.D., M.ASCE, for his contributions to laboratory research, computational modeling and simulation, and full-scale monitoring of wind effects during landfalling hurricanes, as well as his dedication to educating and mentoring the next generation of wind engineering professionals.
Zdeněk P. Bažant Medal for Failure and Damage Prevention
Horacio Dante Espinosa, Ph.D., M.ASCE,
for outstanding experimental, computational, and leadership contributions to the mechanics of failure and damage — spanning scales from nano- to structural, and advancing material design, fracture theory, and structural resilience.
Maurice A. Biot Medal
Gilles Pijaudier-Cabot, Ph.D., M.ASCE,
for his pioneering contributions to nonlocal damage mechanics, fracture and permeability coupling in porous materials, and chemo-mechanical degradation of geomaterials. His work has profoundly advanced the theoretical and applied foundations of poromechanics inspired by Biot’s legacy.
EMI Leonardo da Vinci Award
Rebecca Napolitano, Ph.D., M.ASCE, for transformative contributions that bridge the gap between post-disaster structural assessment and community-led intervention, translating mechanistic insights from reconnaissance data into interactive, generative design tools for participatory resilience planning.
Alfred M. Freudenthal Medal
Kok-Kwang Phoon, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, for his technical contributions and leadership to research and practice in geotechnical risk and reliability.
George W. Housner Structural Control & Monitoring Medal
Chung-Bang Yun, Ph.D.,
for his pioneering and transformative contributions to structural control and health monitoring (extended Kalman filter for structural identification, neural networks for damage identification, and smart active and wireless sensors); and for his international leadership in research and education (ANCRiSST, SPIE, APESS, SISTeC).
Wilfred D. Iwan Award for Mentors in Mechanics Research
Ahsan Kareem, Ph.D., Dist. M. ASCE, NAE, for educating and mentoring an impressive number of students, postdoctoral fellows and practicing engineers who have gone on to improve the safety, sustainability and resilience of civil infrastructure in the face of natural hazards and climate change.
Raymond D. Mindlin Medal
Haiyan Hu, Ph.D., for the pioneering achievements in nonlinear dynamics and control of structural systems, which revealed the essential roles of delayed feedback and hysteresis, and upgraded the design of nonlinear vibration control, active flutter suppression and deployable space structures.
Nathan M. Newmark Medal
Armen Der Kiureghian, Ph.D, M.ASCE, for fundamental contributions to earthquake response spectrum analysis, random vibrations, structural reliability, stochastic modeling of ground motions, computational stochastic mechanics and finite-element reliability methods, structural response to spatially varying excitations, and seismic fragility of structural components and systems.
Robert H. Scanlan Medal
Christos Georgakis, Ph.D., M.ASCE,
for… extraordinary contributions to wind and aerodynamics engineering, by: (1) developing pioneering bridge aerodynamics models, (2) delivering of practical solutions to enhance the design and safety of major bridges worldwide, and (3) educating and mentoring the next generation of bridge engineers.
Theodore von Karman Medal
Glaucio H. Paulino, Ph.D., NAE, F.EMI, M.ASCE,
for pioneering contributions to the field of of mechanics, including advances in geometric mechanics associated to origami and tensegrity engineering, which led to the creation of multifunctional structures and configurational metamaterials with unprecedented properties.