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From:
http://www.galcit.caltech.edu/about/history
California Institute of Technology Department of Aerospace GALCIT history GALCIT = Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology
Yuan-Cheng Fung (PhD 1948; student of Sechler) Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. Professor of Aeronautics, 1951–1966. Considered the father of biomechanics. His early interest in shell structures focused initially on stability issues of curved plates and shells of variable thickness. His interest in airplane stability and fluid-structures interaction precipitated by von Kármán vortices lead to an extended and long involvement in aeroelasticity as documented through his 1955 Introduction to the Theory of Aeroelasticity and which provided leadership into the supersonic age. Author of Fundamentals of Solid Mechanics. Significant work in formulating structural stability problems in statistical terms, especially in connection with supersonic aircraft. His interest in shell structures had a profound influence on his research when he observed in Harold Wayland's laboratories (Caltech Mechanical Engineering) the ease with which blood cells moved through blood vessels of much smaller diameter; observing that a blood cell exhibits a low (~zero) internal pressure to allow the relative flexibility of its shell/membrane. On sabbatical leave in Germany in 1958–1959, he observed that the disciplines of neither medicine nor biology dealt with the concept of mechanical forces in their endeavors. This observation ultimately led to a new career in biomechanics, which he started in the Caltech Firestone Laboratories with the mechanics of lung tissue and its function, but which he then continued very successfully at the University of California, San Diego. (Pictured above: M. Williams and Yuan-Cheng Fung, 1970.)
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