Texas A&M Professor Emeritus to Speak On Materials Science in PFT

LSU’s College of Engineering Dean Vicki Colvin has invited retired Texas A&M Professor Emeritus Alan Needleman to speak in Patrick F. Taylor Hall on Friday, Jan. 30, 3-4:30 p.m., in room 1100. Needleman, who recently retired from Texas A&M’s Materials Science and Engineering Department, is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the Prager Medal of the Society of Engineering Science and the Timoshenko Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He also holds honorary doctorates from the Technical University of Denmark and Ecole Normale Superior de Cachan (France) and is an Honorary Professor of Dalian University of Technology (China).

Needleman received his B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania and finished his Ph.D. at Harvard University. He then spent five years in Applied Mathematics at MIT before moving to Brown University where he served as Dean of Engineering and became Florence Pirce Grant University Professor. After retiring from Brown in 2009, Needleman moved to the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of North Texas and joined the Materials and Engineering Department at Texas A&M University from which he retired in May 2025.

Needleman’s area of expertise that he will speak on is plasticity, dissipation and Clausius-Duhem Inequality.