J. Tinsley Oden

J. Tinsley Oden (born December 25, 1936 in Alexandria, Louisiana) is the Associate Vice President for Research, the Director of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, the Cockrell Family Regents' Chair in Engineering #2, the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Centennial Chair in Computing Systems, a Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and a Professor of Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin. Oden has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.

Dr. Oden was the founding Director of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), which was created in January 2003 as an expansion of the Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics, also directed by Oden for over a decade. The Institute supports broad interdisciplinary research and academic programs in computational engineering and sciences, involving four colleges and 17 academic departments within UT Austin.

He finished secondary school in Alexandria in 1955 and entered Louisiana State University in the fall of that year. He earned a B.S. degree in civil engineering from LSU in 1959. Dr. Oden earned a PhD in engineering mechanics from Oklahoma State University in 1962. He taught at OSU and The University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he was the head of the Department of Engineering Mechanics prior to going to Texas in 1973. He has held visiting professor positions at other universities in the United States, England, and Brazil.

An author of over 500 scientific publications: books, book chapters, conference papers, and monographs, Dr. Oden is an editor of the series, Finite Elements in Flow Problems and of Computational Methods in Nonlinear Mechanics. Among the 49 books and book chapters he has authored or edited are Contact Problems in Elasticity, a six-volume series: Finite Elements, An Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Finite Elements, and several textbooks, including Applied Functional Analysis and Mechanics of Elastic Structures, and, more recently, A Posteriori Error Estimation in Finite Element Analysis, with M. Ainsworth. His treatise, Finite Elements of Nonlinear Continua, published in 1972 and subsequently translated into Russian, Chinese, and Japanese, is cited as having not only demonstrated the great potential of computational methods for producing quantitative realizations of the most complex theories of physical behavior of materials and mechanical systems, but also established computational mechanics as a new intellectually rich discipline that was built upon deep concepts in mathematics, computer sciences, physics, and mechanics. Computational Mechanics has since become a fundamentally important discipline throughout the world, taught in every major university, and the subject of continued research and intellectual activity. Dr. Oden has published extensively in this field and in related areas over the last three decades.