Zdeněk P. Bažant received the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class, from the President of Austria, Heinz Fischer

18 May 2016

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Zdeněk P. Bažant was honored by President Heinz Fischer at a ceremony in the Hofburg, Imperial Palace in Vienna, in the Hall of Maria-Theresa, the Austrian Empress and Czech Queen on May 11.

The award, established in 1955, is bestowed on both Austrians and non-Austrians who have “distinguished themselves and earned general acclaim through especially superior creative and commendable services in the areas of the sciences or the arts.”

“I am emotionally overwhelmed by this news,” said Bažant, a native of Prague. “My grandparents and previous ancestors were all Austrian citizens and had excellent careers as such. Because of defecting from communist Czechoslovakia, I was sentenced in absentia to jail in my native country and could not visit it for more than two decades. During that time, I liked to visit Austria, where it felt almost like home.”

Bažant is a McCormick Institute Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with courtesy appointments in mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering, at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

As a world leader in scaling research in solid mechanics and long-term deformations, Bažant is perhaps best known for developing widely used models to assess the safety of large quasi-brittle structures, such as bridges, dams, tall buildings, ships, aircraft structures and rock structures. He has been associated with RILEM for over four decades, and was awarded the the first Robert L'Hermite medal in 1975, was made a RILEM Fellow in 1996 and a RILEM Honorary Member in 2015. He has led RILEM work on creep and shrinkage, and fracture mechanics of concrete. He has been the Chairperson or member of many RILEM TCs including 242-MDC: Multi-decade creep and shrinkage of concrete: material model and structural analysis, which has brought updated recommendations for the modelling of creep and shrinkage. His landmark papers in Materials and Structures on the practical prediction of time-dependent deformations of concrete (1978) and the crack band theory (1983) have topped the download listings for a long time.

Throughout his career, Bažant has received numerous awards and honors, including election into the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Royal Society of London, Academia Europaea and the Austrian, Czech, Italian and Spanish national academies, as well as seven honorary doctorates.

You can find Professor Bazant's speech here and pictures of the ceremony on our Facebook page.