Ali H. Nayfeh

Ali Hasan Nayfeh (21 December 1933 in the West Bank suburb of Shuwaikah / Tulkarm in occupied Palestine - 27 March 2017) was the inaugural winner of the Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award. He received his B.S. with great distinction in engineering science (1962) and his M.S. (1963) and PhD (1964) in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University. He was a University Distinguished Professor of engineering at Virginia Tech since 1976. He was a volunteer at the University of Jordan. He was the editor-in-chief of Nonlinear Dynamics. He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Vibration and Control from 1995 until his resignation in May 2014, shortly after he had uncovered a fraudulent peer-review ring.

He held honorary doctorates from Marine Technical University (Russia), Technical University of Munich (Germany), and Politechnika Szczecińska (Poland).

Professional memberships

Nayfeh was a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Society of Design and Process Science, and the American Academy of Mechanics.

Awards

Nayfeh received the Pendray Aerospace Literature Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1995; the J. P. Den Hartog Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1997; the Frank J. Maher Award for Excellence in Engineering Education in 1997; the Lyapunov Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2005; the Virginia Academy of Science's Life Achievement in Science Award in 2005; the Gold Medal of Honor from the Academy of Trans-Disciplinary Learning and Advanced Studies in 2007; and the Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award in 2008. In 2014, Nayfeh was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in mechanical engineering.