Marco Amabili, Canada Research Chair in Mechanical Vibrations in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. This year, the Foundation honoured 180 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists from across the United States and Canada. Selected from a pool of nearly 2,500 applicants, the Fellows were appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
Elena Bennett, Canadian Research Chair in Sustainability Science, also was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
“Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honour for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.”
Since its establishment in 1925, the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship program has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to more than 18,000 individuals, including more than 125 Nobel laureates, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and other internationally recognized honours.
Mechanics of the human aorta
“It was a fantastic surprise to learn that I was selected for this award,” said the native of San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy. “I would like to thank all people who supported me.”
Selected fellows receive individual grants to support the unfettered pursuit of their chosen field, according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
“My research is in nonlinear solid mechanics, vibrations, and fluid-structure interaction,” said Amabili, who joined McGill in 2008. “One of the applications that has taken my interest in the recent years is the mechanics of the human aorta. My research group has done breakthrough progress in this area providing experimental results never obtained before. This research is aimed to the development of revolutionary aortic grafts that will help patients. My Guggenheim Fellowship is based on this project.”
Honours and awards
The Guggenheim Fellowship is the most recent honour for Amabili.
He received the Worcester Reed Warner Medal of the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) in 2020; the 2021 Raymond D. Mindlin Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers; and the 2021 International Gili-Agostinelli Prize of the “Lincei” Italian National Academy of Sciences.
Amabili is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; the Canadian Academy of Engineering; Foreign Member of Academia Europaea; Member the European Academy of Sciences and Arts; Member of the European Academy of Sciences; and Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada. He is one of the five members of the Executive Committee of Applied Mechanics Division of the ASME.
Read the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation press release