Anthony Waas
School Director and Professor, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy
Anthony M. Waas is the Director of the School of Engineering for Matter, Transport, and Energy (SEMTE) at Arizona State University. SEMTE encompasses the Aerospace, Mechanical, Materials, Bio, and Chemical Engineering programs. His current research focuses on recyclable composite materials, VTOL vehicles, robotically manufactured lightweight structures—including in-space fabricated structures—computational modeling of composite aerostructures, 3D printed lightweight structures, damage tolerance of composites, affordable textile composites, hydrogen storage for mobility, and data science applications in materials and structural modeling.
Professor Waas served as the Felix Pawlowski Collegiate Chair and Department Chair, Professor of Aerospace Engineering, and Director of the Composite Structures Laboratory at the University of Michigan from 1988 to 2014. In January 2015, he joined the University of Washington as Chair of the Aeronautics Department and the William Boeing Endowed Professor. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), American Society for Composites (ASC), American Academy of Mechanics (AAM), and the Royal Aeronautical Society, UK.
He has received numerous awards including multiple best paper honors, the 2016 AIAA/ASME SDM National Award, the AAM Junior Research National Award, and the ASC Outstanding Researcher International Award. In 2017, he was honored with the AIAA-ASME-ASC James H. Starnes Jr. Award for seminal contributions to composite structures and materials, as well as for mentoring students and young professionals. Professor Waas was elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences in 2017 and to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2018.
Further distinctions include the AIAA ICME Prize (2020), ASME Warner T. Koiter Medal (2020), the AIAA Dryden Lecture in Research, and membership on the US National Academy of Engineering’s Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board since 2021. Most recently, he received the CT Sun Medal from the American Society of Composites in September 2023 and the 2025 ASCE Raymond D. Mindlin Medal recognizing his lifelong contributions to aerospace composite structures.
Ready to mentor
Composites and metamaterials for mechanical and aerospace applications, drones and other autonomous vehicles, thermal management of semiconductors, modeling the response of structural materials.