The Rodney Hill Prize for 2024 has been awarded to Professor Yonggang Huang, Achenbach Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, USA.

This prize is presented once every four years at the International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM), the next occasion being August 2024 at ICTAM 2024 in Daegu, South Korea. The Prize of $25,000 is awarded to a single scientist for outstanding research in solid mechanics over the previous decade. Younger researchers are equally eligible for consideration as those who are more established, and the work should be of great current interest (representing, for example, an emerging field of application of solid mechanics or a significant breakthrough in an established branch of the subject). The prizewinner is determined by a small committee whose members are internationally distinguished in solid mechanics.

The international panel of experts considered many strong nominations from a diverse field. Professor Yonggang Huang receives the prize for his applications of solid mechanics to several emerging fields of significant societal impact, specifically for his work during the last 10 years on mechanics-guided, deterministic 3D assembly and fractal mechanics for stretchable electronics. His work in these areas is having profound impact on materials science, electronics, energy storage, biomedical engineering and manufacturing.