Adrian Bejan Wins ASME Medal

From the The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)

Adrian Bejan, Ph.D., the J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University in North Carolina, has been named the 2024 recipient of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Medal. The award, established in 1920, is the highest award that the Society can bestow and recognizes “eminently distinguished engineering achievement.” ASME will present Bejan with the medal at its International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE) in Portland, Ore., in November.

Bejan is honored for unprecedented creativity, breadth, and permanent impact on engineering; for developments in the new science of energy, motion, form, and evolution; and for building bridges to design in biological, geophysical, and sociological systems.

An eminent scholar in his field, Bejan is credited with several groundbreaking developments. He unified thermodynamics with heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and the science of form (i.e., flow configuration, image, design), as a counterweight to the doctrine of reductionism; discovered, taught, and applied the Constructal Law of evolution in nature; and brought together biologists, physicists, engineers, sociologists, philosophers, economists, managers, and athletes with creative books for the public, including “Design in Nature” (2012), “The Physics of Life” (2016), “Freedom and Evolution” (2020), and “Time and Beauty” (2022). His influential work and prolific publication record have earned him 18 honorary doctorates from 11 countries. He holds a position among the top 0.01% of most-cited and impactful scientists, is the sixth most impactful scholar in mechanical engineering worldwide, and the 11th across all engineering disciplines, according to the citations impact database in PLOS Biology.

Bejan is the recipient of many prior honors. In 2018, he was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal conferred by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. He is a Nautilus Books Award winner for “Time and Beauty,” the winner of the Kimberly-Clark distinguished lectureship from the International Society of Porous Media, a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Green Energy, and from ASME, a prior awardee of the Ralph Coats Roe Medal, the Edward F. Obert Award, and the Max Jakob Memorial Award in conjunction with AIChE. He was named Knight of the French Order of Academic Palms in 2020. Earlier this year, he was awarded the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research from Duke University.

Bejan earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, 1972, and 1975, respectively.