Siavouche Nemat-Nasser

Siavouche "Sia" Nemat-Nasser (April 14, 1936 – January 4, 2021) was an Iranian-American engineer and materials scientist who was Distinguished Professor of Mechanics and Materials in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego). He was a theoretician and experimentalist known for his work in micromechanics and the mechanical behavior of heterogeneous materials.

Early life and education Nemat-Nasser was born on April 14, 1936, in Tehran, Iran, and immigrated to the United States in 1958 to complete his undergraduate degree in civil engineering at Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento). He earned MS (1961) and PhD (1964) degrees in structural mechanics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Other honors included the Timoshenko Medal (2008) and the ASME Medal (2013) from ASME, the Theodore von Kármán Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers (2008), the William Prager Medal of the Society of Engineering Science (2002), and the UC San Diego Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award (2015).