ASTM International Committee F04 on Medical and Surgical Materials and Devices has honored John A. Tesk, Ph.D., of Biomedical Materials and Devices Consulting, Highland, Md., with the Patrick G. Laing Award for his outstanding contributions to the work of the committee in developing standards for medical and surgical devices.

An ASTM International member since 1995, Tesk is a member at large on Committee F04 and works on several F04 subcommittees, including Subcommittee F04.93, which is the U.S. Technical Advisory Group for ISO TC150 on Implants for Surgery.  He has received two other awards for his contributions to F04 – the Moses Award in 1999 and the Leroy Wyman Engineer Award in 2005.

In his early career, Tesk conducted research at Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Ill., and spent time as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  In 1978, he joined the staff at the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as a physical scientist.  Although he officially retired from NIST in 2005, he remains a guest researcher in NIST’s Polymers Division. He now volunteers and does consultant work in biomaterials and standards development. His areas of expertise include dental and biomedical material standards, reference materials and data, with a more recent emphasis on orthopaedic materials, reliability, wear testing, Weibull analysis and scaffolds for tissue engineering.  

In addition to ASTM International, Tesk is a founder and charter member of the Society for Biomaterials, a fellow of the Academy of Dental Materials, an honorary member of the Japanese Society for Dental Materials and Devices, and a member of the American Physical Society, the American Society for Metals, the Technical Materials Society and Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.

The holder of eight patents, Tesk has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers as well as chapters for six books and four encyclopedias, and he has served on several advisory and editorial boards related to biomaterials and dentistry.  He holds a B.S. in engineering science, an M.S. in metallurgy and a Ph.D. in materials science, all from Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.

Release #8321