Gerhard A. Holzapfel

Gerhard Alfred Holzapfel (born May 22, 1961) is an Austrian scientist, (bio)mechanician. He is currently a professor of Biomechanics and Head of the Institute of Biomechanics at Graz University of Technology, Austria, since 2007. He is also the International Chair of Biomechanics (adjunct professorship) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and a visiting professor at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow, Scotland. He was a professor of biomechanics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, for 9 years (7 years as an adjunct professor) until 2013. He is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the international scientific journal ''Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology'' by Springer Nature since the first issue published in June 2002. In Feb. 2025, Holzapfel was elected as an international member of the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Holzapfel is widely known for his contributions to the fields of nonlinear solid mechanics, constitutive and computational modeling of fiber-reinforced materials and soft biological tissues including blood vessels in health and disease. He has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering selected by ISI Web of Science, Thomson Reuters and listed as "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014". His graduate textbook, ''Nonlinear Solid Mechanics: A Continuum Approach for Engineering'' published in 2000, has become a standard reference in the area of solid mechanics. Provided by Wikipedia