Elias Aifantis

Short Bio:

Elias C. Aifantis graduated with a Diploma from National Technical University of Athens in 1973 and with a PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1975. He became an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign in 1976, a visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota in 1980 and a full Professor at the Michigan Technological University in 1982. Currently he is an Emeritus Professor of Mechanics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki/Greece and Michigan Technological University/USA, as well as Mercator fellow at Friedrich-Alexander University/Germany and a Distinguished Professor at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture/China. Formerly, he has also been a Distinguished Faculty Advisor at King Abdulaziz University/Saudi Arabia, Distinguished Visiting Expert at ITMO University/Russia and Southwest Jiaotong University/China, as well as MegaGrant Director at Togliatti State University/Russia. He has promoted highly interdisciplinary work in mechanics of materials by bringing into the field of solid mechanics ideas from diffusion theory, chemical reactions, and nonlinear physics. He has coined the terms dislocation patterning, material instabilities, gradient plasticity/elasticity, chemo/nanomechanics, and pioneered internal length gradient (ILG) theories in these fields. Currently, he is extending the ILG framework to revisit electromagnetism and Maxwell’s equations, as well as gravitation and Newton’s Law. He has published over 339 articles and received about 12,609 citations with 55 h-index (Scopus); 11,730 citations with 54 h-index (Web of Science); 17,860 citations with 66 h-index (Google Scholar). He is included in the ISI Web of knowledge list of the world’s most highly cited authors in engineering.