Anthony Bedford is Professor Emeritus of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been on the faculty since 1968. He also has industrial experience at Douglas Missiles and Space Systems Division, Sandia National Laboratories, and at TRW, where he worked on the Apollo program. His main professional activity has been education and research in engineering mechanics. He is coauthor of Engineering Mechanics: Statics and Dynamics (with Wallace T. Fowler) and Introduction to Elastic Wave Propagation (with Douglas S. Drumheller). Kenneth Liechti is Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin and holds the Zarrow Centennial Professorship in Engineering.

He received a B.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering at Glasgow University and M. S. and Ph.D. degrees in Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. He gained industrial experience at General Dynamics Fort Worth Division prior to joining the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 1982.

Dr. Liechti's main areas of teaching and research are in the mechanics of materials and fracture mechanics. He is the author or coauthor of papers on interfacial fracture, mechanics of contact, adhesion and friction at smaller and smaller scales, and the nonlinear behavior of polymers. He has consulted on fracture mechanics problems with several companies. He is a fellow of the Adhesion Society, the Society of Experimental Mechanics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Academy of Mechanics and an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He the joint editor of the journal of the Mechanics of Time-Dependent Materials. He was the 2015 recipient of the Adhesion Society's Award for Excellence in Adhesion Science, sponsored by 3M. More recently, Dr.

Liechti was the recipient of the Murray Medal from the Society of Experimental Mechanics in 2017.