AE Professor honored for his work in fracture of sustainable materials and structures research. 

Christos E. Athanasiou, assistant professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech, has been awarded the 2025 Orr Early Career Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). This prestigious honor, presented by the ASME Materials Division, recognizes exceptional early-career contributions in the areas of experimental, computational, or theoretical research in fatigue, fracture, and creep.

Athanasiou leads the Daedalus Lab at Georgia Tech, which is dedicated to advancing science and technology in both biological and engineered systems to address urgent societal and environmental challenges. His research combines high-throughput experimentation with machine learning to understand and predict the failure behavior of complex, sustainable materials.

His recent work includes the development of reconfigurable, load-bearing structures designed for extraterrestrial applications featured in Matter; the creation of design frameworks to optimize the reuse of recycled polymers in consumer packaging detailed in the arXiv paper; and the development of artificial intelligence algorithms to obtain easy-to-use analytical formulas for predicting material failure included in the Journal of Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

As a rising leader in the field, Athanasiou is passionate about shaping the future of materials and structures by pushing the boundaries of how researchers design, test, and deploy materials that can endure demanding environments while minimizing environmental impact.

Christos E Athanasiou
Assistant Professor

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