UA Engineering Professor Honored with National Award

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dr. James P. Hubner, associate professor of aerospace engineering and mechanics at The University of Alabama, was named the 2013 recipient of the Felix Zandman Award for exceptional contributions in the development of measurements and applications with the help of photoelastic coatings.

The Zandman Award was established in 1989 by the Society of Experimental Mechanics, or SEM, an international network of scientists and engineers founded in 1943, in honor of Dr. Felix Zandman for his work with photoelastic coatings.

Hubner is the first College of Engineering faculty member to win this award since Samuel C. Gambrell Jr., professor emeritus of engineering mechanics, was honored in 1997.

SEM’s membership includes a broad spectrum of professional experimentalists, development engineers, design engineers, test engineers, technicians, and research and development scientists from industry and educational institutions with the united goal “to promote and encourage the furtherance of knowledge pertaining to the education, research and application of experimental mechanics to the determination of materials and system behavior.”

Hubner’s research interests in experimental aerodynamics and solid mechanics include luminescent sensing, low Reynolds number flows, micro air vehicles and fluid-structure interactions. Part of his research is developing luminescent photoelastic coatings, a new technique to measure the surface strain of complex objects. The full-field method can reduce the number of prototypes during a product’s design by limiting redundant testing without sacrificing quality.

While at the University, Hubner was the 2007 recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an honor given to top engineers and scientists at the start of their careers, with the objective of applying luminescence technology, the emission of light as a result of energy other than heat, to the automotive and aircraft industries.

He received his doctorate in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1995 and has published 30 journal articles.

Hubner is an associate fellow in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and also serves as an active member of SEM. He will receive his award at the SEM Annual Conference in June 2013 in Lombard, Ill., where two of his graduate students, Hisham Ali and Zheng Zhang, will present their current research efforts.

In 1837, The University of Alabama became one of the first five universities in the nation to offer engineering classes. Today, UA’s fully accredited College of Engineering has more than 3,900 students and more than 110 faculty. In the last eight years, students in the College have been named USA Today All-USA College Academic Team members, Goldwater, Hollings, Portz and Truman scholars.