Professor Ali Nayfeh is a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. He earned three academic degrees (BS, MS, and Ph.D.) in four and a half years in engineering science and aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University. He is one of the most prolific engineering scholars in the world — his 10 books, 32 book chapters, over 400 journal papers, over 500 conference papers, and over 120 invited lectures represent his wide-ranging and penetrating contributions to the engineering literature.
Currently, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Nonlinear Dynamics and Journal of Vibration and Control. Professor Nayfeh advanced the-state-of-the-art in all fields of engineering, including fluid mechanics, structural interaction, structural control, biomedical, and ship and submarine dynamics. He extended his work to power systems and power electronics. His method of multiple scales is the method of choice for treating nonlinear vibration problems. His work has been cited by almost everyone working in the area of applied mechanics and every graduate student should begin his work by studying Professor Nayfeh’s books. It is amazing that his citation exceeds 15,000. Professor Nayfeh supervised over 75 doctoral and postdoctoral students.
Nayfeh was awarded the Gold Medal of Kuwait Prize in basic sciences in 1981. He is the recipient of the AIAA Pendray Aerospace Literature Award for his seminal contributions to the aerospace community (1995). In 1996 he received the ASME J. P. Den Hartog Award in recognition of lifetime contributions to the teaching and practice of vibration engineering, and in 2005 he received the ASME Lyapunov Award for life long contributions to nonlinear dynamics. He is the first recipient of the newly established Lyapunov Award. In 2005 he received Virginia's Lifetime Achievement in Science Award, presented by the Science Museum of Virginia. His academic career and pioneering research work have earned him Fellow memberships in many societies. He received Honorary Doctorates from overseas universities, such as Marine Technical University of St. Petersburg in Russia, the Technical University of Munich in Germany, and Politechnika Szczecinska of Poland.
