4/14/2026
The ASCE Board of Direction has honored CEE Professor Arif Masud with inclusion in its 2026 class of distinguished members. Learn More>>
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The ASCE Board of Direction has honored CEE Professor Arif Masud with inclusion in its 2026 class of distinguished members.
Distinguished membership is an elite honor reserved for ASCE fellows or members who represent the most accomplished civil engineers in the profession. It is the highest honor available to civil engineers, as those who are chosen must reflect the values of civil engineering innovation and practice. A new class is elected annually.
ASCE recognized Masud for his seminal contributions to stabilized finite element methods for structural mechanics and layered additive manufacturing, the development of coupled thermo-chemo-mechanical models for the curing of cementitious and polymeric composites, and distinguished leadership in technical and professional societies.
Masud joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006, where he is the John and Eileen Blumenschein Professor and Robert H. Dodds Faculty Scholar. Masud also holds joint appointments in the Grainger Departments of Mechanical Science and Engineering and Aerospace Engineering, as well as Professor of Biomedical and Translational Sciences in the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine. He is the inaugural director of the Center for Manufacturing Smart Infrastructure, where he has helped advance interdisciplinary research linking infrastructure, computation, and advanced manufacturing.
Masud has made fundamental and pioneering contributions to the development of Stabilized and Variational Multiscale Methods for fluid and solid mechanics, residual-based Turbulence models, biofluid dynamics and non-Newtonian fluids, and mixture theory models for coupled chemo-thermo-mechanical problem. Masud recently received an award by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop tools for coupling different types of models vital to big-picture climate modeling. With this NSF provided computational resource, Masud and his team hope to improve methods for hurricane prediction.
He was elected to the board of governors of ASCE’s Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI)in 2020, and served as its president from 2023 to 2025. Through the leadership of Masud and CEE professor Paolo Gardoni, CEE at Illinois served as host institution for the 2024 EMI Conference and Probabilistic Mechanics and Reliability Conference (EMI/PMC). The joint conference brought together the brightest minds in engineering and probabilistic mechanics for three days of presentations and discussion of cutting-edge research from across the globe.
In addition to his professional leadership, Masud has received several awards. He was also the 2022 recipient of the Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Award, given by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, received the J.N. Reddy Medal in 2023 for Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures “for contributions to the mechanics of coupled field problems, stabilized and variational multiscale methods, and discontinuous Galerkin methods.”
The ASCE Distinguished Members class of 2026 will be formally inducted at the 2026 OPAL Gala, Thursday Oct. 15, in Reston, Virginia.