Bharat Bhushan receives 2020 Tribology Gold Medal
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Bharat Bhushan has been awarded the Tribology Gold Medal Award by the International Tribology Council (ITC) for lifetime achievements in the field of tribology.
Tribology is the study of friction, wear, lubrication, and the design of bearings and the science of interacting surfaces in relative motion.
The ITC Gold Medal was established and first awarded in 1972. It has been awarded to 48 individuals from 18 different countries. Bhushan is the 11th American to be honored, the first since 2013.
The award is in recognition of his five decades of outstanding contributions to the advancement of tribology. The impact of his research has extended to the interdisciplinary areas of biological and materials science, and he has pioneered the tribology of magnetic storage devices, bionanotechnology, cosmetics and biomimetics, nanotribology and green tribology.
Professor Bhushan was born in a small town, Jhinjhana, India. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science. At the age of 20, Bhushan left India to pursue an advanced degree in Tribology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He took his first course in tribology from Professor Ernest Rabinowicz, who was the 1998 Gold Medal winner and a student of the pioneer, Professor David Tabor, the first Gold Medal winner in 1972. He received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, followed by an M.S. in Mechanics and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Bhushan is currently an Academy Professor at Ohio State. He has served as an Ohio Eminent Scholar, The Howard D. Winbigler Professor in the College of Engineering, Director of the Nanoprobe Laboratory for Bio/Nanotechnology and Biomimetics, and affiliated faculty in John Glenn College of Public Affairs. He has authored 10 scientific books, over 100 book chapters, more than 900 scientific papers and 60 technical reports.
As well as receiving more than two dozen awards from professional societies, industry and U.S. government agencies, Bhushan received NASA’s Certificate of Appreciation to recognize the critical tasks that he performed in support of President Reagan’s Commission investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. He is also the recipient of various international fellowships including the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize for Senior Scientists, the Max Planck Foundation Research Award for Outstanding Foreign Scientists and the Fulbright Senior Scholar Award.
His proudest tribology moment was to teach a tribology course in 1999 as a faculty-appointed guest professor at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK, the home of the tribology pioneers F. P. Bowden and David Tabor.
Bhushan’s international recognitions include foreign member of the Russian International Academy of Engineering, the Belarusian Academy of Engineering and Technology, and the Academy of Triboengineering of Ukraine. He is an Honorary Member of the Society of Tribologists of Belarus and STLE, Fellow of ASME, IEEE, New York Academy of Sciences, and Member of ASEE, Sigma Xi and Tau Beta Pi.
The Gold Medal ceremony will take place at UK Embassy in Washington, DC, hosted by British ambassador to the US.
adapted from a press release from the International Tribology Council, originally published 01/06/2021
