| Rohan Abeyaratne | |
|---|---|
| Born | Sri Lanka |
| Nationality | Sri Lankan |
| Education | California Institute of Technology University of Ceylon Royal College Colombo |
| Occupation | Quentin Berg Professor of Mechanics |
| Employer | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Rohan Abeyaratne is a Sri Lankan born American academic and engineer. The Quentin Berg Professor of Mechanics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he is currently the CEO & Director of the Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (the "SMART" Centre) and formerly the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.[1][2]
Educated at the prestigious Royal College Colombo, he went on to gain his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ceylon in 1975 where he won the E.O.E. Pereira Gold Medal. He went on to gain his MSc and PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1976 and 1979 respectively.
Abeyaratne was Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT from 2001 to 2008. In 2008 the Governing Board of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre [1] appointed him as its CEO/Director, a position he has held since 2009. The SMART Centre is MIT's first Institutional research centre located outside Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Abeyaratne received the MacVicar Fellowship, MIT’s highest award for education in 2000; the Quentin Berg Professorship in 2001; the Daniel C. Drucker Medal from ASME in 2010, as well as its Fellowship in 1998. In 1996 he was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics and later was elected as its President.
Among Abeyaratne's publications are a book co-authored with J.K. Knowles, Evolution of Phase Transitions: a Continuum Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2006 [2]; and a free e-book entitled Lecture Notes on The Mechanics of Elastic Solids: Volume 1: A Brief Review of Some Mathematical Preliminaries, 2006, downloadable from [3].