Genin to receive ASME Robert Henry Thurston Lecture Award
The award honors Guy Genin’s leadership in mechanobiology
Guy Genin, the Harold and Kathleen Faught Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, 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. Since its elevation by ASME to a society-level award in 2000 with a lecture given by Genin’s doctoral advisor, John W. Hutchinson from Harvard University, more than two-thirds of awardees are members of the National Academy of Engineering.
“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 2026 at the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE) 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. That framing has produced a series of landmark discoveries: that migrating cells can be reprogrammed to follow softer rather than stiffer environments, reversing a process implicated in the spread of many cancers; that the tendon-to-bone interface achieves its toughness through smooth gradients in mineralized collagen, an insight now being translated into improved surgical repair strategies for joints such as the rotator cuff; and that hair cells on the leaves of plants act as mechanical and acoustic sensors, an engineering description of plant biology that has enabled new approaches to soil remediation. His work has also seeded translational innovations including novel intravascular catheters and surgical adhesives.
Genin co-founded and co-directs the National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center for Engineering MechanoBiology, a $50 million investment and one of 14 NSF Science and Technology Centers across all fields of science, and the National Institutes of Health-funded Center for CardioVascular Research Innovation in Surgery and Engineering (CVISE) at WashU. He holds appointments in biomedical engineering in McKelvey Engineering and in neurological surgery at WashU Medicine.
Genin is a fellow of ASME, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineers, and the National Academy of Inventors. He has received numerous honors for his contributions to biomechanics and translational engineering, among them the ASME Savio L-Y. Woo Medal for Translational Biomechanics (2024), the James B. Eads Award from the Academy of Science of St. Louis (2020), and the ASME Richard Skalak Award (2013).