Tal Cohen, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been selected to receive the 2023 Eshelby Mechanics Award for Young Faculty. The award is given annually to rapidly emerging junior faculty who exemplify the creative use and development of mechanics. The award will be formally presented at the 2024 Applied Mechanics Division awards banquet at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) conference in November.

Cohen directs the Cohen Mechanics Group at MIT where her group explores nonlinear solid mechanics to understand how materials behave under extreme conditions. By studying material instabilities, extreme dynamic loading conditions, growth, and chemical coupling, Cohen and her group combine theoretical models and experiments to shape our understanding of the observed phenomena and apply those insights in the design and characterization of material systems. Those insights and applications range from creating stronger buildings to modeling the properties of blood clots and fitness of tissue in guiding the surgical removal of cancerous tissue.

She received her bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Technion, Israel. She was a postdoctoral in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University before joining the faculty in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT in 2016. She is the recipient of the 2020 NSF CAREER Award and ONR Young Investigator Award, the MIT Technion Post-Doctoral Fellowship, 2013 and 2014, and Zonta International Ameila Earhart Fellowship, 2011 and 2012.

The Eshelby Mechanics Award was established in 2012 in memory of Professor John Douglas Eshelby to promote the field of mechanics, among young researchers. To learn more about the award, including selection committee, visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshelby_Mechanics_Award_for_Young_Faculty