January 13, 2022

Associate Professor Yuhang Hu is the 2022 recipient of the James Dally Young Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Mechanics. The award was granted in recognition of Hu’s “original contributions to interdisciplinary research in chemomechanics of soft active materials with integrated multiscale characterization and multiphysics modeling.”

The purpose of the Dally Award is to recognize a young professional (within 10 years of Ph.D.) who has made significant contributions in education and has demonstrated an excellence in research in the field of experimental mechanics. The award is named after James W. Dally, P.E., Ph.D., has been internationally recognized for seminal contributions to the development of experimental methods for studying dynamic fracture mechanics and stress wave propagation problems; for academic leadership; and for developing innovative teaching materials and textbooks for undergraduate and graduate education.

Yuhang Hu is an Associate Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2011 and continued to work there as a postdoctoral fellow from 2021 to 2014. In 2015, she joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor and moved to Georgia Tech in 2018. Her research focuses on chemomechanics of soft active materials, an interdisciplinary area between mechanics and polymer chemistry. Her work integrates multi-scale material characterization and multi-physics modeling. She is also the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR YIP Award, Extreme Mechanics Letters Young Investigator Award, Journal of Applied Mechanics Award and ASME Sia Nemat-Nassar Early Career Award.