Professor Anthony Waas Presented with CT Sun Medal

Anthony (Tony) Waas, The Felix Pawlowski Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded the CT Sun Medal by the American Society for Composites (ASC). This prestigious medal is awarded by the ASC every four years and is considered one of the society’s highest honors. Professor Waas will be presented with this honor at the annual ASC meeting in Boston later this month.

As a fellow member of the ASC, Waas is receiving the CT Sun medal, which celebrates and promotes the principles cherished and inspired by CT Sun and that are admired by his friends and colleagues. These principles include leadership in the profession consisting of excellence in mechanics of composite materials research, excellence in mechanics of composite materials education, and dedicated mentoring of colleagues, particularly those in the early stages of their careers.

“This is a great honor and I am humbled to accept it. The award reflects the accomplishments of scores of students, postdocs and fellow researchers who have collaborated with us to advance the field of composite materials and composite structures. So, I am happy to acknowledge them in accepting this award”

His research interests lie in the general area of mechanics of solids with particular emphasis on composite materials and their applications in lightweight structures. Waas’s current thrusts are in computational modeling of damage and progressive failure of aerospace composite structures, the design, testing, and characterization of in-space manufactured metamaterial structures, and lightweight hydrogen storage solutions for mobility applications. The emphasis of his research is to generate a fundamental understanding of how composite materials and structures deform and fail. Waas has built a combined experimental, computational, and analytical research program spanning multiple length scales to accomplish this. Anthony Waas joined UM Aerospace in 1988 and has risen through the ranks. He was the Boeing Egtvedt Endowed Chair and Department Chair of the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at the University of Washington, 2015-2018, and the Richard Auhll Department Chair of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, 2018-2023. He is internationally recognized for his scholarly contributions and has served as a consultant to various industries, including the Boeing Company, where his expertise is recognized in the B787 Dreamliner development and certification. His short CV is available here.