Thomas J.R. Hughes

Biography

Thomas J.R. Hughes holds B.E. and M.E. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Pratt Institute and an M.S. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Engineering Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Berkeley, Caltech, and Stanford before joining the University of Texas at Austin. At Stanford he served as Chairman of the Division of Applied Mechanics, Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chairman of the Division of Mechanics and Computation, and occupied the Crary Chair of Engineering.  

Dr. Hughes is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Section for Mathematics and the Physical Sciences), the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere (Mathematics Section), and the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas. 

Dr. Hughes is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM), the American Academy of Mechanics (AAM), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the Engineering Mechanics Institute of ASCE, and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. He is an Honorary Member of the Japanese Association for Computational Mechanics (JACM). 

Dr. Hughes is a Founder and past President of USACM and IACM, past Chairman of the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME, past Chairman of the US National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, and Editor Emeritus of the international journal Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering.  

One of the most widely cited authors in Engineering Science, Hughes has been elected to Distinguished Member, ASCE’s highest honor, and has received ASME’s highest honor, the ASME Medal. He has also been awarded the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize and von Karman Medal from ASCE, the Timoshenko Medal, Worcester Reed Warner Medal, and Melville Medal from ASME, the von Neumann Medal from USACM, the Gauss-Newton Medal from IACM, the Computational Mechanics Award from the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME), the Grand Prize from the Japan Society of Computational Engineering and Science (JSCES), the Computational Mechanics Award from JACM, the Humboldt Research Award for Senior Scientists from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Wilhem Exner Medal from the Austrian Association für SME (Öesterreichischer Gewerbeverein, OGV), the International Scientific Career Award from the Argentinian Association for Computational Mechanics (AMCA), the SIAM/ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Prize in Computational Science and Engineering, the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) Distinguished Scientist Award, the O.C. Zienkiewicz Medal from the Polish Association for Computational Mechanics (PACM), the A.C. Eringen Medal from the Society for Engineering Science (SES), the Ralph E. Kleinman Prize from SIAM, the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics from City University of Hong Kong, and the Monie A. Ferst Award from Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society.

Upon graduation from UC Berkeley, Hughes received the Bernard Freidman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics, the only engineer to have ever done so. At Stanford University, he received the Dean’s Award for Academic Accomplishment. At the University of Texas at Austin he has received the Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award, the Billy and Claude R. Hocott Distinguished Centennial Engineering Research Award, and the University Co-op Career Research Excellence Award.  He has also received the Alumni Achievement Award from Pratt Institute. 

Dr. Hughes has received honorary doctorates from the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the University of Pavia (Italy), the University of Padua (Italy), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Trondheim), Northwestern University (Evanston), the University of A Coruña (Spain), and the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) Lyon (France).

He held the Cattedra Galileiana (Galileo Galilei Chair), Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy, in 1999, the Eshbach Professorship, Northwestern University, in 2000, and the World Class University Distinguished Professorship, University of Ulsan, S. Korea, 2009 – 2013.

The Special Achievement Award for Young Investigators in Applied Mechanics is an award given annually by the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME. In 2008 this award was renamed the Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award. 

In 2012 the Computational Fluid Mechanics Award of the United States Association for Computational Mechanics was renamed the Thomas J.R. Hughes Medal.

In 2020 the United States National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (USNC/TAM) of the National Academies established the Thomas J. R. Hughes Travel Fellowships to provide travel support for doctoral and/or post-doctoral students enrolled at universities in the United States to attend U.S. National Congresses for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and the International Congresses of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. 

In 2023 Elsevier, the publisher of the international journal, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering (CMAME), instituted an award in honor of J. Tinsley Oden and Thomas J.R. Hughes. The Oden-Hughes Award for Best Paper was established in commemoration of Dr. Oden’s retirement from the journal on January 1, 2022 and Dr. Hughes’ retirement on January 1, 2023. Collectively, Oden and Hughes served for 85 years as Editors of CMAME. 

Dr. Hughes' research interests and the mission of the Computational Mechanics Group (CMG) are to pursue research and development in computational mechanics and to promote Ph.D. and post-doctoral education in the discipline. Activities span fundamental mathematical investigations, the development of new and powerful computational methods and algorithms, and engineering and scientific applications. 

A current focus of the CMG is isogeometric analysis, an integrated vision of computational geometry and analysis aimed at unifying the disparate methods and data structures of Computer Aided Geometric Design (CAGD) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and breaking the current bottleneck in the translation of CAGD representations to FEA models. Isogeometric analysis provides a unique geometric foundation to product development, from design through analysis.

Other current CMG research projects include computational medicine applications in cardiovascular medicine, prostate cancer, and glymphatic transport, phase field modeling of brittle and ductile fracture, and the development of new discretization technologies for computational structural mechanics and fluid dynamics.

Hughes maintaines close collaborations with the following: Oden Institute Center for Predictive Engineering & Computational Sciences, the Computational Visualization Center, the Center for Cardiovascular Simulation, and several U.S. and international universities. 

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