The Microcirculatory Society, Inc.
Newsletter

Volume 28, Number 3

Winter, 2000/2001

The White House announced that Dr. Yuan-Cheng Fung, Professor Emeritus of Bioengineering and Applied Mechanics and founder of the Bioengineering Program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), received the President's National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor. Dr. Fung was recognized at an awards dinner, December 1, 2000, in Washington, D.C. The Medal was conferred by President Clinton.

In announcing the 12 Medal of Science honorees for the Year 2000, President Clinton paid tribute to a group of scientific leaders who changed or set new directions in social policy, neuroscience, biology, chemistry, bioengineering, mathematics, physics, and earth and environmental sciences. Dr. Fung is the first bioengineer to receive this most prestigious honor in science in this country. This year he is the only engineer receiving the Medal.

Dr. Fung has made outstanding contributions in bioengineering after an earlier illustrious career in aeronautical engineering. He is widely recognized as the father of biomechanics, establishing the fundamentals of biomechanical properties and behaviors of virtually every organ and tissue in the body. He has written several authoritative books on biomechanics that are used as textbooks around the world, in addition to books on solid mechanics and continuum mechanics. He adds the National Medal of Science to a long list of honors that include the Founder's Award from the National Academy of Engineering in 1998, the Bioengineering Award from the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineering , the Timoshenko Medal and the Melville Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Landis Award from the Microcirculatory Society, the ALZA Award from the Biomedical

Engineering Society, the Borelli Award from the American Society of Biomechanics, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Chinese Scientists and Engineers of California. In 1986 the ASME established the "Y.C. Fung Young Investigator Award" in his honor.