Jan D. Achenbach
Dutch-american scientist in engineering
All edits
Jan Drewes Achenbach was the Walter P. Murphy
Professor and Distinguished McCormick School Professor
Emeritus-in-Service at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.
Throughout his career, a distinctive feature of Jan’s
research was the elegant use of rigorous mathematical
methods in engineering applications. For example, traditional ultrasonic nondestructive methods are based on
empirical measurements and heuristic analysis based on
signal processing. It was Jan who introduced quantitative
analysis of scattering of ultrasonic waves by defects to
nondestructive evaluation. Later in his career, when Jan
was asked what work of his that he was most proud of,
he answered “I added the letter Q to NDE.” In fact, the
research field is now called quantitative nondestructive
evaluation (QNDE). In 2008, Jan delivered the plenary
lecture at the 27th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation,
the prime annual gathering of the QNDE community around the world. Jan’s lecture was
entitled, “NDE with a Q.” It was a brilliant blend of science with a retrospective on progress
in engineering. A German air base for fighter planes was established on the outskirts of the town and, towards the end of the
war, Jan and his friends, mostly about nine years old, would get as close to the air base as
the barbed wire and the minefields would allow to see the German fighter planes take off
to engage the Allied planes that were flying overhead. The excitement of watching fighter
planes in action generated his lifelong interest in aviation. Jan attended high school in
Leeuwarden, where he excelled at soccer. Jan became so accomplished that he would
have become a professional soccer player if his father, a barber, had not counseled him to
pursue an academic career. So, Jan went to study aeronautical engineering at the Delft
University of Technology (TU Delft). The launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the ensuing
space race, which stimulated rapid growth in both fundamental and applied research
in U.S. universities, inspired Jan. He applied and was awarded a scholarship to attend
Stanford University for graduate studies in 1959, before he was able to officially graduate
from TU Delft. Jan thus became a member of the Sputnik generation of scientists and
engineers.
After receiving a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University in
1962, Jan spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. In 1963, he
was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University, where he remained for the rest of his career except
for sabbatical leaves at the University of California at San Diego and the TU Delft.
In 1981, he became the Walter P. Murphy Professor in the Departments of Civil and
Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and in 1992 he was named
Distinguished McCormick School Professor.
In June 1999, the night before a planned flight to Korea, Jan suffered serious cardiac
arrhythmia with a loss of consciousness. He was brought by ambulance within a few
minutes to the nearby Evanston Hospital, then transferred to Northwestern Memorial
Hospital and kept for two weeks in an induced hypothermic coma. Upon waking up, his
first phone call was to his secretary to check on his project funding. It took him a year,
but his recovery was remarkable. It is a testimony to Jan’s will, determination and perseverance that he restarted his research programs, and successfully so, which his colleagues
doubted at first.
In 2009, he was awarded emeritus status, which he sought in part to give his departments more positions for hiring younger faculty. He remained a voting member of the
faculty by taking the position of Walter P. Murphy and Distinguished McCormick
JAN ACHENBACH
School Professor Emeritus-in-Service in the McCormick School of Engineering and
Applied Science. He kept this position until his death. During all his years as an
emeritus-in-service faculty member, he continued his research, supervised a number of
Ph.D. students, and published numerous papers.
It was on a blind tennis date at Stanford that Jan met his future wife Marcia Fee. They
were married in 1961. The following year, Jan earned his Ph.D. in aeronautics and
astronautics and Marcia her bachelor of arts in history. During their year in New York
when Jan was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia, Marcia worked for Oxford University
Press as a copywriter. When the couple settled in Evanston, Marcia returned to school
and earned a master’s degree in English from Northwestern in 1965 and then taught
at Kendall College and Oak Therapeutic School, both in Evanston. These experiences
led her to pursue a master of social work degree at the University of Chicago in 1975.
Marcia worked for three years at Cook County Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry and
then for 23 years at the Jewish Child & Family Services. After her retirement, Marcia
continued helping others through her Evanston community activities. She was appointed
to the Evanston Mental Health Board and Commission on Aging by the mayor and
served as a Master Gardener plant information officer at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Jan and Marcia found especially enriching their time with family and Jan’s students,
many of whom were from China, Japan, and Korea. They also enjoyed traveling, the
Chicago Symphony, Chicago’s Lyric Opera, and live theater. Marcia passed away on July
25, 2019, after 58 years of happy marriage. Marcia was extremely close to her two sisters,
Judy and Wendy, and her godson Paul. She was a devoted and deeply loved aunt and
great aunt to four nephews, one niece, and seven great nieces and nephews. Judy now
lives in Stamford, Connecticut, and Wendy lives in the Washington, D.C., area. Both of
them have fond memories of the Achenbachs.
Marcia was born in Cebu Province in the Philippines, where her American parents were
living for her father’s work with Standard Oil. She was one year old when the Japanese
seized Manila on January 2, 1942, rounding up and interning 5,000 Americans at
Santo Tomas Internment Camp. As a result, Marcia was separated from her parents
until she was two. Her parents had gone to Manila on business, and Marcia was left at
the family home on the island of Cebu under the care of her Amah and the company’s
assistant manager. It is this moment that set Marcia on a path to appreciate the kindness
of strangers and to seek to help others. A British couple with an 11-year-old son cared
for Marcia from hideouts in the hills of Cebu during internments at multiple detention
centers until finally she was reunited with her parents and baby sister Judy at Santo
JAN ACHENBACH
Tomas with the help of the Red Cross. They were liberated when Marcia was four years
old. After the war, Marcia’s father resumed his career with Standard Oil in Singapore
and Bangkok, and Marcia attended boarding schools in Australia, Switzerland, and the
United States. She enrolled at Stanford University in 1958.
Both Marcia and Jan were very active within the Northwestern community. The couple
once said, “We have spent most of our lives at Northwestern and have always been happy
here. Northwestern has given us lifelong education, culture, music, travel, and other
benefits.” Their lifelong association with Northwestern inspired the couple to give their
entire estate to the university. The planned gift will establish two endowed professorships
in mechanics of materials and solids in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and
the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Career
In 1963, Jan started his long career at Northwestern University. As an early member
of the solid mechanics group, Jan was instrumental in building a team of top scholars
that established Northwestern’s leadership position in solid mechanics in the United
States and around the world. Established in the early 1960s by George Herrmann, the
Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (TAM) Program at Northwestern has been a hub
of research activities even since its inception. In addition to Jan, the early members
of the group in the civil engineering department in the 1970s included excellent
young researchers such as John Dundurs, Leon Keer, Toshio Mura, Zdeněk Bažant,
Sia Nemat-Nasser, and Ted Belytschko, and from the Materials Science Department,
Johannes (Hans) Weertmann, all of whom later attained fame and six became National
Academy of Engineering (NAE) members. The group in the 1960s also included George
Herrmann (later inducted to the NAE, too) until he left to become department chair
at Stanford, and Seng-Lip Lee until he left to become department chair at the Asian
Institute of Technology in Thailand. The largest, multimillion-dollar effort in this group,
conducted jointly with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), took place from
1974 to 1979 and was a project funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research
Applied to National Needs (RANN) program. Led by Weertmann, it also involved Jan
and several others from the Northwestern faculty. The goal was to analyze a proposed
hot-dry-rock geothermal energy scheme and drill in the Jemez caldera in New Mexico.
The findings showed the heat output to decay too fast. Nevertheless, this skeptical
conclusion had a major influence on policy and further research in the United States and
Japan.
JAN ACHENBACH
For two decades beginning in the mid-1960s, the young solid mechanics group in the
Civil Engineering Department, with Jan at its helm, was very collaborative and social.
Every Friday at 4 p.m., there was a mechanics seminar, led mostly by a guest speaker.
Long discussions often followed in a group standing at a three-leaf blackboard filled
with equations and sketches in chalk (such a mode of presentation, from which one
could actually understand the speaker’s argument, unfortunately disappeared with the
arrival of transparencies and PowerPoint). John Dundurs made sure that after each
seminar there was a party with the speaker at someone’s home. One memorable party in
1972, at Toshio’s home, lasted until 4 a.m., as Ronald Rivlin, the speaker and one of the
famous mechanics gurus of that time, entertained all with anecdotal stories about other
mechanicians.
With support from the Federal Aviation Administration, Jan founded the Center for
Quality Engineering and Failure Prevention (QEFP) at Northwestern in 1985. The
center initially focused on developing nondestructive evaluation (NDE) technologies for
the aerospace industry, then gradually expanded its scope to many areas of engineering
applications, including structural health monitoring of civil infrastructures and nuclear
power facilities. The center quickly became a magnet that attracted many young and
promising students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting professors from all over the world.
Within the NDE community, it was well known that there were two centers of excellence—one was at Iowa State University and focused on applied research, and the other
was the QEFP at Northwestern and focused on fundamental research.
Throughout his career, Jan supervised more than forty Ph.D. students and numerous
postdocs. Some of Jan’s former students, such as Ben Freund and C. T. Sun, the former
a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of
Sciences, have become distinguished researchers themselves. As many of Jan’s students
can testify, Jan was a strict mentor with very high standards. Jan’s high expectations of
his students inspired many of them to make achievements beyond their potentials. For
his teaching and mentoring, Jan was elected to the Chicago Tribune All-Professor Team
in 1993. In 2004, he received the Tutorial Citation Award from the American Society
of Nondestructive Testing. In 2014, Sigma Xi recognized Jan with the Monie A. Ferst
Award for his “notable contributions to the motivation and encouragement of research
through education.”
Jan was also very active in serving the professional societies. He was a leader in our
mechanics research community. As a member of the Executive Committee of the
JAN ACHENBACH
Applied Mechanics Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
and of the U.S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, as editor
and founder of the Journal of Wave Motion, as QEFP director, and as holder of other
important offices, he provided strong leadership to our research community.
Jan was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1982 and
the National Academy of Sciences in 1992 and a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences in 1994. He became a Corresponding Member of the Royal
Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and an Honorary Foreign Member of
the National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Korea, in 2010. He was awarded the
ASME Timoshenko Medal in 1992, the SES William Prager Medal in 2001, ASME
Honorary Membership in 2002, the ASCE Raymond D. Mindlin Medal in 2009, the
ASCE Theodore Van Karman Medal in 2010, and the ASME Medal in 2012, as well
as a number of other awards. He became a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Acoustical
Society of America, and the American Academy of Mechanics. He received honorary
doctorates from Zhejiang University in China in 2011 and from Clarkson University in
Potsdam, New York, in 2017, and was awarded the position of Honorary Professor at the
Beijing Institute of Technology in 2012.
In 2003, Jan was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology for engineering
research and education in the use of ultrasonic methods. In 2005, he received the U.S.
National Medal of Science for pioneering the field of quantitative nondestructive evaluation. He received both from President George W. Bush in ceremonies at the White
House.
Jan Drewes Achenbach was the Walter P. Murphy
Jan Drewes Achenbach was the Walter P. Murphy
Professor and Distinguished McCormick School Professor
Emeritus-in-Service at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.
Throughout his career, a distinctive feature of Jan’s
research was the elegant use of rigorous mathematical
methods in engineering applications. For example, traditional ultrasonic nondestructive methods are based on
empirical measurements and heuristic analysis based on
signal processing. It was Jan who introduced quantitative
analysis of scattering of ultrasonic waves by defects to
nondestructive evaluation. Later in his career, when Jan
was asked what work of his that he was most proud of,
he answered “I added the letter Q to NDE.” In fact, the
research field is now called quantitative nondestructive
evaluation (QNDE). In 2008, Jan delivered the plenary
lecture at the 27th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation,
the prime annual gathering of the QNDE community around the world. Jan’s lecture was
entitled, “NDE with a Q.” It was a brilliant blend of science with a retrospective on progress
in engineering. A German air base for fighter planes was established on the outskirts of the town and, towards the end of the
war, Jan and his friends, mostly about nine years old, would get as close to the air base as
the barbed wire and the minefields would allow to see the German fighter planes take off
to engage the Allied planes that were flying overhead. The excitement of watching fighter
planes in action generated his lifelong interest in aviation. Jan attended high school in
Leeuwarden, where he excelled at soccer. Jan became so accomplished that he would
have become a professional soccer player if his father, a barber, had not counseled him to
pursue an academic career. So, Jan went to study aeronautical engineering at the Delft
University of Technology (TU Delft). The launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the ensuing
space race, which stimulated rapid growth in both fundamental and applied research
in U.S. universities, inspired Jan. He applied and was awarded a scholarship to attend
Stanford University for graduate studies in 1959, before he was able to officially graduate
from TU Delft. Jan thus became a member of the Sputnik generation of scientists and
engineers.
After receiving a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University in
1962, Jan spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. In 1963, he
was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University, where he remained for the rest of his career except
for sabbatical leaves at the University of California at San Diego and the TU Delft.
In 1981, he became the Walter P. Murphy Professor in the Departments of Civil and
Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and in 1992 he was named
Distinguished McCormick School Professor.
In June 1999, the night before a planned flight to Korea, Jan suffered serious cardiac
arrhythmia with a loss of consciousness. He was brought by ambulance within a few
minutes to the nearby Evanston Hospital, then transferred to Northwestern Memorial
Hospital and kept for two weeks in an induced hypothermic coma. Upon waking up, his
first phone call was to his secretary to check on his project funding. It took him a year,
but his recovery was remarkable. It is a testimony to Jan’s will, determination and perseverance that he restarted his research programs, and successfully so, which his colleagues
doubted at first.
In 2009, he was awarded emeritus status, which he sought in part to give his departments more positions for hiring younger faculty. He remained a voting member of the
faculty by taking the position of Walter P. Murphy and Distinguished McCormick
JAN ACHENBACH
School Professor Emeritus-in-Service in the McCormick School of Engineering and
Applied Science. He kept this position until his death. During all his years as an
emeritus-in-service faculty member, he continued his research, supervised a number of
Ph.D. students, and published numerous papers.
It was on a blind tennis date at Stanford that Jan met his future wife Marcia Fee. They
were married in 1961. The following year, Jan earned his Ph.D. in aeronautics and
astronautics and Marcia her bachelor of arts in history. During their year in New York
when Jan was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia, Marcia worked for Oxford University
Press as a copywriter. When the couple settled in Evanston, Marcia returned to school
and earned a master’s degree in English from Northwestern in 1965 and then taught
at Kendall College and Oak Therapeutic School, both in Evanston. These experiences
led her to pursue a master of social work degree at the University of Chicago in 1975.
Marcia worked for three years at Cook County Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry and
then for 23 years at the Jewish Child & Family Services. After her retirement, Marcia
continued helping others through her Evanston community activities. She was appointed
to the Evanston Mental Health Board and Commission on Aging by the mayor and
served as a Master Gardener plant information officer at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Jan and Marcia found especially enriching their time with family and Jan’s students,
many of whom were from China, Japan, and Korea. They also enjoyed traveling, the
Chicago Symphony, Chicago’s Lyric Opera, and live theater. Marcia passed away on July
25, 2019, after 58 years of happy marriage. Marcia was extremely close to her two sisters,
Judy and Wendy, and her godson Paul. She was a devoted and deeply loved aunt and
great aunt to four nephews, one niece, and seven great nieces and nephews. Judy now
lives in Stamford, Connecticut, and Wendy lives in the Washington, D.C., area. Both of
them have fond memories of the Achenbachs.
Marcia was born in Cebu Province in the Philippines, where her American parents were
living for her father’s work with Standard Oil. She was one year old when the Japanese
seized Manila on January 2, 1942, rounding up and interning 5,000 Americans at
Santo Tomas Internment Camp. As a result, Marcia was separated from her parents
until she was two. Her parents had gone to Manila on business, and Marcia was left at
the family home on the island of Cebu under the care of her Amah and the company’s
assistant manager. It is this moment that set Marcia on a path to appreciate the kindness
of strangers and to seek to help others. A British couple with an 11-year-old son cared
for Marcia from hideouts in the hills of Cebu during internments at multiple detention
centers until finally she was reunited with her parents and baby sister Judy at Santo
JAN ACHENBACH
Tomas with the help of the Red Cross. They were liberated when Marcia was four years
old. After the war, Marcia’s father resumed his career with Standard Oil in Singapore
and Bangkok, and Marcia attended boarding schools in Australia, Switzerland, and the
United States. She enrolled at Stanford University in 1958.
Both Marcia and Jan were very active within the Northwestern community. The couple
once said, “We have spent most of our lives at Northwestern and have always been happy
here. Northwestern has given us lifelong education, culture, music, travel, and other
benefits.” Their lifelong association with Northwestern inspired the couple to give their
entire estate to the university. The planned gift will establish two endowed professorships
in mechanics of materials and solids in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and
the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Career
In 1963, Jan started his long career at Northwestern University. As an early member
of the solid mechanics group, Jan was instrumental in building a team of top scholars
that established Northwestern’s leadership position in solid mechanics in the United
States and around the world. Established in the early 1960s by George Herrmann, the
Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (TAM) Program at Northwestern has been a hub
of research activities even since its inception. In addition to Jan, the early members
of the group in the civil engineering department in the 1970s included excellent
young researchers such as John Dundurs, Leon Keer, Toshio Mura, Zdeněk Bažant,
Sia Nemat-Nasser, and Ted Belytschko, and from the Materials Science Department,
Johannes (Hans) Weertmann, all of whom later attained fame and six became National
Academy of Engineering (NAE) members. The group in the 1960s also included George
Herrmann (later inducted to the NAE, too) until he left to become department chair
at Stanford, and Seng-Lip Lee until he left to become department chair at the Asian
Institute of Technology in Thailand. The largest, multimillion-dollar effort in this group,
conducted jointly with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), took place from
1974 to 1979 and was a project funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research
Applied to National Needs (RANN) program. Led by Weertmann, it also involved Jan
and several others from the Northwestern faculty. The goal was to analyze a proposed
hot-dry-rock geothermal energy scheme and drill in the Jemez caldera in New Mexico.
The findings showed the heat output to decay too fast. Nevertheless, this skeptical
conclusion had a major influence on policy and further research in the United States and
Japan.
JAN ACHENBACH
For two decades beginning in the mid-1960s, the young solid mechanics group in the
Civil Engineering Department, with Jan at its helm, was very collaborative and social.
Every Friday at 4 p.m., there was a mechanics seminar, led mostly by a guest speaker.
Long discussions often followed in a group standing at a three-leaf blackboard filled
with equations and sketches in chalk (such a mode of presentation, from which one
could actually understand the speaker’s argument, unfortunately disappeared with the
arrival of transparencies and PowerPoint). John Dundurs made sure that after each
seminar there was a party with the speaker at someone’s home. One memorable party in
1972, at Toshio’s home, lasted until 4 a.m., as Ronald Rivlin, the speaker and one of the
famous mechanics gurus of that time, entertained all with anecdotal stories about other
mechanicians.
With support from the Federal Aviation Administration, Jan founded the Center for
Quality Engineering and Failure Prevention (QEFP) at Northwestern in 1985. The
center initially focused on developing nondestructive evaluation (NDE) technologies for
the aerospace industry, then gradually expanded its scope to many areas of engineering
applications, including structural health monitoring of civil infrastructures and nuclear
power facilities. The center quickly became a magnet that attracted many young and
promising students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting professors from all over the world.
Within the NDE community, it was well known that there were two centers of excellence—one was at Iowa State University and focused on applied research, and the other
was the QEFP at Northwestern and focused on fundamental research.
Throughout his career, Jan supervised more than forty Ph.D. students and numerous
postdocs. Some of Jan’s former students, such as Ben Freund and C. T. Sun, the former
a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of
Sciences, have become distinguished researchers themselves. As many of Jan’s students
can testify, Jan was a strict mentor with very high standards. Jan’s high expectations of
his students inspired many of them to make achievements beyond their potentials. For
his teaching and mentoring, Jan was elected to the Chicago Tribune All-Professor Team
in 1993. In 2004, he received the Tutorial Citation Award from the American Society
of Nondestructive Testing. In 2014, Sigma Xi recognized Jan with the Monie A. Ferst
Award for his “notable contributions to the motivation and encouragement of research
through education.”
Jan was also very active in serving the professional societies. He was a leader in our
mechanics research community. As a member of the Executive Committee of the
JAN ACHENBACH
Applied Mechanics Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
and of the U.S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, as editor
and founder of the Journal of Wave Motion, as QEFP director, and as holder of other
important offices, he provided strong leadership to our research community.
Jan was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1982 and
the National Academy of Sciences in 1992 and a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences in 1994. He became a Corresponding Member of the Royal
Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and an Honorary Foreign Member of
the National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Korea, in 2010. He was awarded the
ASME Timoshenko Medal in 1992, the SES William Prager Medal in 2001, ASME
Honorary Membership in 2002, the ASCE Raymond D. Mindlin Medal in 2009, the
ASCE Theodore Van Karman Medal in 2010, and the ASME Medal in 2012, as well
as a number of other awards. He became a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Acoustical
Society of America, and the American Academy of Mechanics. He received honorary
doctorates from Zhejiang University in China in 2011 and from Clarkson University in
Potsdam, New York, in 2017, and was awarded the position of Honorary Professor at the
Beijing Institute of Technology in 2012.
In 2003, Jan was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology for engineering
research and education in the use of ultrasonic methods. In 2005, he received the U.S.
National Medal of Science for pioneering the field of quantitative nondestructive evaluation. He received both from President George W. Bush in ceremonies at the White
House.
Jan D. Achenbach
Dutch-american scientist in engineering
Find more people like Jan D. Achenbach
