Professors Faber and Brady Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Katherine T. Faber, who will be joining the Caltech faculty in July 2014 as the Simon Ramo Professor of Materials Science, and John F. Brady, Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, have been elected to the 2014 American Academy of Arts and Sciences class of fellows.  They have joined an assembly that was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholars to provide practical solutions to pressing issues.  [Caltech Release]

Professor Faber's research focuses on understanding fracture and toughening of brittle materials such as those used for high-temperature coatings for power generation applications. She also works on the fabrication of ceramic materials with controlled porosity. She is cofounder and codirector of the Northwestern University-Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS), which employs advanced materials science techniques for conservation science. She is a Distinguished Life Member of the American Ceramic Society (2013), and became a National Science Foundation American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellow in 2010.

Professor Brady’s research focuses on the area of complex fluids and active matter which includes microstructural elements such as suspensions, colloidal dispersions, and self-propelling particles. Understanding these materials led him to develop a novel computational method called Stokesian dynamics. He has won the 2012 Fluid Dynamics Prize from the American Physical Society and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1999.