The Distinguished Alumni Award is the highest honor the Institute bestows upon a graduate, and is in recognition of "a particular achievement of noteworthy value,
a series of such achievements, or a career of noteworthy accomplishment." Selections are made by a faculty and alumni committee and confirmed by the Board of Trustees.
Since the award's inception in 1966 Caltech has recognized a total of 221 alumni as standouts in science, engineering, business and the arts.
Awarded 1994
Yuan-Cheng Bertram Fung is professor of bioengineering and applied mechanics, emeritus, at UC San Diego. He is the only researcher to have been elected to the National Acdemy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, a distinction that reflects his wide-ranging accomplishments in fields ranging from aeronautics to bioengineering, a field that he helped to pioneer in the 1950s. After earning his Caltech PhD, Fung spent 20 years on the Institute's aeronautics faculty, ultimately becoming a full professor, and dividing his research between solid and fluid mechanics. By 1958, he had begun to investigate the applications of these and other engineering areas to biomedical problems, an interest that led to his pioneering work in the field of biomechanics. He joined UC San Diego in 1966, with the responsibility of creating a bioengineering division there. He retired as professor emeritus in 1992. A prolific author and frequent consultant, Fung has published nearly 300 technical papers and several books, among them Introduction to the Theory of Aeroelasticity; A First Course in Continuum Mechanics; and a three-volume work, Biomechanics: Mechanical Properties of Living Tissues; Biodynamics: Circulation; and Biomechanics: Motion, Flow, Stress, and Growth.