Sidney Yip wins Monie A. Ferst Award
NSE Professor Emeritus Sidney (Sid) Yip is the recipient of the 2023 Monie A. Ferst Award. Established in 1977, the Sigma Xi’s Monie A. Ferst Award honors “science and engineering teachers who have inspired their students to significant research achievements”.
Yip is a professor emeritus at the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He was born to Leung Tsoi Yip and Emma (Kwong) Yip in Beijing, China on January 28, 1936, and have lived in Shanghai and Hong Kong in his childhood. He moved to the United States with his family in 1950.
Yip received his BS (1958), MS (1959) and PhD (1962) degrees from the University of Michigan, and then was a Postdoctoral Fellow there from 1962-63. After working as Research Associate at Cornell University from 1963-65, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering at MIT in 1965, by the inaugural department head Manson Benedict. After moving through the ranks (Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering, 1969-73; Professor of Nuclear Engineering, 1973–2009; Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, 2000–2009), he retired in 2009.Throughout his academic career, Sid has taught nuclear physics, neutron scattering and multiscale materials modeling and simulations.
Yip’s early-career research was in transport phenomena, liquid state dynamics and neutron scattering. He has coauthored three monographs, Molecular Hydrodynamics (1980) with Jean Pierre Boon, a graduate-level introduction to the theory and application of time correlation functions and the molecular theory of fluid dynamics, Molecular Spectroscopy with Neutrons (1968) with Henri Boutin, and The Foundations of Neutron Transport Theory (1963) with his PhD advisor, Richard K. Osborn.
Yip’s later research are in theory, modeling and atomistic simulation studies of thermal and mechanical properties of crystalline and amorphous solids. In total, Sid has published about four hundred journal publications in the fields of statistical physics, materials science, and atomistic modeling and simulations, with an h-index 82 in 2022. He has supervised 15 masters and 44 doctoral students. He has edited several monographs and was the Chief Editor of Handbook of Materials Modeling (second edition, co-edited 2020, in six volumes). He has coauthored several monographs, and authored one text in nuclear radiation interactions in 2014 and a monograph to appear in 2023.
Yip has won the John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, 1972; Fellow (American Physical Society) 1973; U.S. Senior Scientist Award (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) 1979; Outstanding Alumnus (University of Michigan) 1993; Spira Award (MIT) 1996; Tsun Lee Lecture Award (Chinese Academy of Sciences) 2005; Nuclear Engineering Distinguished Technical Lecturer (North Carolina State University) 2006, Lyman Handy Lecturer (University of Southern California) 2007; Outstanding Referee (American Physical Society) 2011; Robert Cahn Award (NuMat) 2012, Distinguished Lecture Series (City University of Hong Kong) 2015.
The award symposium and ceremony to honor Yip will be held at Georgia Tech on September 29.
August 2023
Department of Nuclear Science & Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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