Guy Genin, the Harold and Kathleen Faught Professor of Mechanical Engineering at WashU McKelvey Engineering, has been selected to deliver the 2026 Robert Henry Thurston Lecture, one of the highest honors conferred by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
ASME cited Genin "for pioneering application of mechanical engineering to biology and healthcare, and for global leadership in the development of the emerging field of mechanobiology."
Established in 1925 in honor of Robert Henry Thurston, the founding president of ASME, the Thurston Lecture is the society's oldest named lectureship. It is awarded annually to one leader in pure or applied science or engineering whose work merits a lecture of broad interest to the engineering community, and its lecturers over the past century have helped shape the intellectual agenda of mechanical engineering as a discipline.
"I am deeply grateful to ASME and the selection committee for this recognition, and to the extraordinary students, collaborators and colleagues at WashU and beyond who have made this work possible," Genin said. "It is a tremendous privilege to deliver a lecture that carries such a distinguished history."
Genin will receive the award in November at the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in Vancouver, Canada, where he will deliver the Thurston Lecture.
Genin is credited with bringing the full quantitative apparatus of mechanical engineering to bear on biology, recognizing that living cells respond not merely to the magnitude of mechanical forces but to their full tensorial character, including direction, anisotropy and the architecture of the fibrous matrix that transmits them.
