Engineering symposium to honor Prof. Kerr

12:17 p.m., April 28, 2004--UD’s departments of civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering are hosting the “Kerr Symposium on Engineering Mechanics,” Thursday-Friday, April 29-30, at the Clayton Hall Conference Center. The symposium, which honors Prof. Arnold D. Kerr upon his retirement, will focus on the state of the art in this field through invited lectures by distinguished experts. The College of Engineering is helping to sponsor the symposium.

According to symposium chair Michael J. Chajes, all of the speakers are major figures and pioneers in the field of engineering mechanics. “We’re very pleased to have seven who are members of the National Academy of Engineering,” he said. “As a group, these speakers represent a wealth of accumulated knowledge.”

Professor of civil engineering at the University of Delaware since 1978, Kerr has worked in the field of engineering mechanics for nearly five decades. Before joining the UD faculty, he spent 14 years at New York University and then served as a visiting professor at Princeton for several years. He holds a Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from Northwestern University.

During his lengthy and distinguished career, Kerr has authored more than 100 papers, advised some 50 graduate students, and served as a reviewer for various journals in engineering mechanics, ice engineering, railway engineering and applied mathematics. He has also taught hundreds of students in his courses on mechanics of materials, analysis of structures, strength of materials, continuum mechanics, theory of stability, structural dynamics, theory of plates and shells, railroad engineering, the history of structural mechanics and related subjects.

Kerr is a member of numerous committees in the areas of engineering mechanics and railway engineering and has organized several international symposia in these areas. He also has served as an invited seminar speaker at such prestigious schools as Brown, Princeton, Yale, Northwestern, and other universities in the U.S., Canada and Western Europe.

For more information, visit [www.ce.udel.edu/kerrsymposium.html].

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