Richard B. Hetnarski, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology, passed away on the 8th of June 2024.

Dr. Richard B. Hetnarski (1928 – 2024) received his MS degree in mechanical engineering from Gdansk University of Technology, Gdansk, Poland, in 1952; his MS degree in mathematics from the University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland, in 1960; and his degree of doctor of technical sciences at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw in 1964.
After receiving his PhD, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University in New York and at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
He worked at the Institute of Aviation in Warsaw (1955 – 1959) and at the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1959 – 1969).
In 1969, together with his family, he emigrated from Poland to the United States where he became Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
From 1970 to 1998, he held positions in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology - first as New York State Science and Technology Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor (1970 – 1971), then as Professor (1971 – 1992), and finally as James E. Gleason Professor (1992 – 1998).
In 1979, Richard held a summer faculty fellowship at the NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

At CISM, he taught for two weeks in September 1979 a UNESCO sponsored course on “Thermal Effects in Engineering Structures”.

He is the author of over 60 papers on mechanics and mathematics. He wrote and published his last two scientific papers, one in 2020 at the age of 92 and one in 2024 at the age of 95.
He was the co-founder and president of the International Congresses on Thermal Stresses (ICTS).
In 1978, he founded the Journal of Thermal Stresses, and was its editor-in-chief for 40 years. Starting in 1988, he served for a number of years as an associate editor of Applied Mechanics Reviews. He was a coauthor of five graduate-level textbooks on Theory of Elasticity and Thermal Stresses, and three of them are now on the market in the second edition. He edited the five-volume research handbook Thermal Stresses (1986 – 1999). He was the editor of the 11-volume Encyclopedia of Thermal Stresses, an interdisciplinary reference work, published by Springer in 2014.

CISM expresses its condolences to the family and colleagues of Dr. Hetnarski. His contributions to the field and his legacy in education and research will be long remembered.