Honorary Member Award

The grade of Honorary Member is the highest honor the Society can bestow. Honorary Members are approved by the Executive Board in accordance with Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution which states, "An Honorary Member is an individual of widely recognized eminence in the field of experimental mechanics who is elected for life by unanimous secret ballot of the Executive Board upon written proposal by at least 25 Individual Members. Receipt of the proposal shall precede the election by at least 30 days. An Honorary Member shall have the same rights and privileges as an Individual Member. The number of living Honorary Members shall not exceed ten at any given time."

Each new honorary member is notified of this honor by letter from the President of the Society and publicly honored by presentation of a plaque at the next meeting of the Society.

 
The Society’s Honorary Members include:

 
2012 Honorary Member Award: William N. Sharpe, Jr.

William N. Sharpe, Jr. is the Alonzo G. Decker Professor Emeritus and founding chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. A member since 1966, he was president of SEM in 1984/5, Murray Lecturer in 2002, and editor of the 2008 Handbook of Experimental Mechanics. After graduating from N. C. State in 1961 and Johns Hopkins in 1966, he began his teaching/research career at Michigan State. He became chairman of Mechanical Engineering at Louisiana State in 1978 and returned to Hopkins in 1983. He is a Fellow of SEM as well as ASME where he received the Roe Award for ‘notable contributions to the profession’.

His research centered on a real-time laser interferometric technique for measuring biaxial strain over very small gage lengths. The advent of MEMS in the 1990s led to the need for mechanical properties of specimens produced by the same processes as the microdevices. The uniaxial tensile specimens he developed were typically 5 microns thick, 100 microns wide and 2 mm long. This noncontact technique was ideally suited for stress-strain curves meeting the requirements of ASTM. Polysilicon, gold, platinum, silicon nitride, and silicon dioxide films were the subjects of extensive studies.