WASHINGTON, DC – Greek-American John Michopoulos, a research scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has been awarded the Academy of Athens’ P.S. Theocaris Award for outstanding research work, the NRL reported.

Dr. Michopoulos’ work, “Direct Strain Tensor Approximation for Full-Field Strain Measurement Methods” was published in July in the International Journal of Numerical Methods in Engineering, NRL reported.

According the NRL’s website, “The award represents the highest honor bestowed by the Academy of Athens and by implication by the nation of the Hellenic Republic to the respective recipients who are innovating in the area of mechanics of materials,” said Academy Professor Antonios N. Kounadis. “We congratulate Dr. Michopoulos on this high international honor from Greece,” said Dr. Peter Matic, superintendent, NRL Materials Science and Technology Division, according to the website. “This award represents an important reminder of how far-and-wide the work of Dr. Michopoulos is seen, and how its value is recognized by scholarly organizations.”

The award is named after Pericles S. Theocaris, the late esteemed mechanics and solid fracture researcher and experimentalist, who was a member of the Academy. The award, the NRL website reports, “is endowed for the Academy by the P.S. Theocaris Public Benefit Foundation, and is accompanied by a monetary amount of 5000 Euros. The intention of the award is to draw distinction to researchers and scholars for the best scientific publication in the technical area of mechanics of materials, with an emphasis on fracture mechanics, experimental strength of materials, and mechanics of polymers.”

Theocaris was Michopoulos’ advisor for the latter’s doctoral dissertation, “Closed Form Solutions of Plane Crack Problems in Isotropic and Anisotropic Elasticity.”