Martin Ostoja-Starzewski is a Polish-Canadian-American scientist and engineer, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research includes work on deterministic and stochastic mechanics: random and fractal media, representative elementary volume in linear and nonlinear material systems, universal elastic anisotropy index, random fields, and bridging continuum mechanics to fluctuation theorem.
Ostoja-Starzewski is an immigrant to Canada and the United States from Poland. He received his undergraduate education at Cracow University of Technology, followed by Master’s and Ph.D. degrees at McGill University in 1980 and 1983, respectively. His Ph.D. thesis advisor was David Robert Axelrad.[1] He worked as a faculty member at Purdue University, Michigan State University, Institute of Paper Science and Technology at Georgia Tech, McGill University, and (since 2006) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also affiliated with the university's Beckman Institute, National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Institute for Condensed Matter Theory. He has been Site co-Director of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Novel High Voltage/Temperature Materials and Structures (2012-2022).
He serves as Editor of Acta Mechanica, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Thermal Stresses, and Chair Managing Editor of Mathematics and Mechanics of Complex Systems. He is Fellow of ASME, American Academy of Mechanics, Society of Engineering Science, and Associate Fellow of AIAA. His distinctions include Timoshenko Distinguished Visitor at Stanford University (2012), the Worcester Reed Warner Medal of ASME (2018), membership in European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2022), and Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (2023).
