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See:
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/hutchinson/
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/directory/hutchins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Hutchinson
http://imechanica.org/node/195
http://imechanica.org/blog/452
http://imechanica.org/node/11330
http://www.lehigh.edu/~inlehi/bio_hutchinson_j.html
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-5nvuQIAAAAJ&hl=en
http://www.researchgate.net/researcher/11637931_John_W_Hutchinson
Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
website: http://www.seas.harvard.edu/hutchinson
Awards:
ASTM Irwin Medal in 1982,
Swedlow Award in 1993,
SES Prager Medal in 1991,
ASME Nadai Award in 1991,
Thurston Award in 2000,
Timoshenko Medal in 2002
Honorary Doctoral Degrees:
The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 1985
The Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark in 1992
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois in 2002
Lehigh University in 2004
University of Illinois in 2003
About Professor John Hutchinson (article from Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences,
www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/publications/.../john-hutchinson)
Holding the Center, Bringing the Field of Fractures Together
“Is Professor Hutchinson still there?” ranks as one of the most common questions—apart from “Does Harvard really do engineering?”—that SEAS staff members are likely to hear.
John Hutchinson, Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering and one of the most distinguished researchers in fracture mechanics, has spent the past four decades at Harvard.
In fact, he earned his PhD and started his career in the same building, Pierce Hall, where he currently works. Such longevity may explain in part why so many students remember and ask for him, but as anyone who has met him knows, his popularity comes down to character.
Hutchinson has an ever-present ease about him that draws in students; a bright-eyed sense of excitement that never wavers, whether it is his first or fortieth commencement; and the ability to see potential solutions to problems where others see only dead ends.
“It is unusual to spend one’s entire career at the same institution,” he says. “For me this has been great, since Harvard is such a good place to work and teach. I’ve never felt restless at Harvard, but that can be partly attributed to the fact that I have taken a six-month sabbatical or leave of absence almost every three years—to England twice, California for a year, and to Denmark the rest of the times.”
Because of his globetrotting, his influence extends well beyond one campus. In 2002, when he was awarded the Timoshenko Medal, considered the highest honor in applied mechanics, the committee wrote: “An interesting aspect of his personality but also of his impact on mechanics of solids and materials becomes apparent if we look at the names of some of the people with whom he has worked.” All the researchers mentioned, with appointments located on the opposite coast and the opposite side of the world, rank as pioneers in engineering and applied mechanics (see sidebar).
Thankfully, Hutchinson is not an academic who looks good only on paper; he excels in the classroom as well. His alma mater, Lehigh University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, in bestowing him honorary degrees, both cited his dedication to mentorship.
For the latter, nominator L. Ben Freund wrote: “His abilities as an educator/mentor are most in evidence through his former graduate students who are forging distinguished careers for themselves at Illinois, Brown, Harvard, and many other universities, companies, and laboratories in the U.S. and abroad.”
Hutchinson says without hesitation that his students and collaborators, including his one-time acolyte, now Harvard colleague Zhigang Suo, Allen E. and Marilyn M. Puckett Professor of Mechanics and Materials, arrive with “great things” already inside them. “Any faculty advisor knows you cannot take credit for what your students achieve,” he says bluntly.
Nevertheless, the evidence, both quantitative (number of coauthored papers) and qualitative (praise from students and colleagues), points to a strong correlation: being taught by or collaborating with Hutchison often leads to a successful outcome.
Faculty should, he contends, provide students with opportunities and startup ideas and then “set them loose.” As evidence, Suo was only one individual in a group of students from China, including Huajian Gao (now at Brown), Young Huang (now at the University of Illinois), and Tianjian Lu (now at Cambridge), who were successfully set loose.
All of them came to Harvard in the 1980s and 1990s to study solid mechanics—and all but one of them worked with Hutchinson. “These individuals, and others among our students, had not only risen to the top of an incrediblycompetitive educational system in China, but they had exceptional training in mathematics and mechanics,” he says. “They were ready to go when they arrived at our doorstep, and we were
very lucky to have them as students.”
A teacher thanking his students, which sounds more like a proverb than a practice, showcases why Hutchison stands out. He relishes the chance to work closely with students and postdocs on pieces of a larger puzzle in applied mechanics, which no doubt leaves a lasting impression on them.
He worries that with large-scale, multiple-investigator projects securing the majority of today’s grants and funding, such critical relationships might suffer. He says the “jury is out” on which is the better approach to research, but a funding agency need not look further than Hutchinson’s legacies for what is possible at the small
scale or, better, simply stay tuned and wait for what is to come.
Of particular note has been Hutchinson’s collaborations with Tony Evans, a professor of materials and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, over the past 25 years. “Tony is a materials engineer with an active laboratory, and I am a mechanics theoretician—together we have quite broadresearch interests and we continue to work on lots of interesting technological problems.”
“What counts is what you are doing, not what you have done,” he explains. “Of course, there is satisfaction in realizing that people are using your work—there would be little reason for doing research without that. But it is the act of doing that is the heart of engineering. I saw an interview with Duke Ellington late in his life, when he was asked which of all the songs he had composed he liked the best.
Without hesitation, he replied, ‘The one I am working on now.’ ” Researchers, however, consistently cite a particular paper Hutchinson worked on with Suo, “Mixed-mode cracking in layered materials,” in 1992, as their favorite composition. The article is among the 10 most-cited papers in the field of engineering in the past decade.
“Zhigang was a young faculty member at UCSB when we wrote this article, and he claims he was a bit bored by the task, but I had a pretty good idea it would be a bestseller,” Hutchinson says. “While some have termed this article as one of the ‘bibles’ in our field, in fact most of the papers citing it have been from outside our field, mainly from the electronics industry, where they are famous for getting layered materials to do exceptional things.”
That his work inspired researchers from outside engineering and applied science is yet another confirmation of why his office is likely to remain one of the more popular sites to visit on campus (no rubbing of his toe permitted, however). “Like most of us, I live from day to day.
My plans are to continue working on technical problems in my field that I identify through interactions with colleagues,” Hutchinson says.
“As I said, it is the problem that I am working on now that is the most interesting. I have no big aspirations. Any success I may have achieved has been in small increments over long periods of time, and I intend to continue that process for a while longer.”
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