ASTM International Committee E08 on Fatigue and Fracture has presented the Edward T. Wessel Award to M. R. Mitchell, Ph.D., president of Mechanics and Materials Consulting in Flagstaff, Ariz. The committee honored Mitchell for his exceptional leadership and mentoring role in the development of standards based on fracture mechanics technology.

A member of ASTM International since 1985, Mitchell is secretary of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/ASTM Fatigue and Fracture subcommittee (E08.93) and a past chairman of Committee E08. An ASTM fellow who received the Award of Merit in 1998, Mitchell also works on Committees E28 on Mechanical Testing, F04 on Medical and Surgical Materials and Devices and G01 on Corrosion of Metals and served a term on the ASTM Standing Committee on Publications. He has received several other awards for his ASTM contributions, including the Fatigue Achievement Award, Outgoing Chairman Award and Award of Appreciation from E08, and the Excellence in Standardization Leadership Award from E28.
 
Mitchell specializes in fatigue and fracture of materials, fatigue lifetime predictive techniques, materials compatibility/selection, design optimization, shape memory alloys, cast materials, failure analysis and other similar topics. Prior to starting his consulting business in 2005, he was a senior research associate at W.L. Gore and Associates, Flagstaff, Ariz., a senior research scientist at Rockwell International Science Center, Thousand Oaks, Calif., and research engineer at Ford Motor Co., Scientific Research Staff, Dearborn, Mich. He has also worked in academia, serving as assistant professor in theoretical and applied mechanics (TAM) at the University of Illinois from 1971 to 1976 and Moorpark Community College from 1987 to 2002, and as an adjunct professor in the mechanical engineering department at Northern Arizona University from 2003 through 2012.

Outside ASTM International, Mitchell is a member of ISO, where he serves as secretary of TC164 SC5 on Fatigue, as well as the Society of Automotive Engineers. He is a past president and current member of the Conference Planning Board of Shape Memory and Superelastic Technologies Inc. (SMST) and an alumni board member of the Mechanical Science and Engineering Department (MechSE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A graduate of the Lawrence Institute of Technology, Southfield, Mich., where he received a B.S. in mechanical engineering, Mitchell also holds an M.S. in metallurgical engineering from Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich. He earned his doctorate in TAM from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the university presented him with the Alumni of the Year Award in 2008. Mitchell holds three U.S. patents and one European patent. He has also been the editor in chief of the ASTM International Journal of Testing and Evaluation since 2006.

ASTM PR Contact: Erin K. Brennan, Phone: 610-832-9602; ebrennan@astm.org

Release #9455