Born in England in 1921 and educated in Poland and at Imperial College, London, Professor Olgierd Cecil Zienkiewicz has had a distinguished career in the engineering fields of solid and fluid mechanics. He was formerly the head of the Department of Civil Engineering, and is currently Director of the Institute for Numerical Methods in Engineering, at the University College of Swansea in the University of Wales.
Professor Zienkiewicz's scientific contributions to the fields of solid and fluid mechanics have been many, and he is the author of numerous scientific papers, covering work of great importance to the stress analysis of dams, nuclear reactors, offshore engineering, lubrication theory, and the development of the finite element method.
Professor Zienkiewicz's writings on the finite element method in structural engineering have been a major factor in leading to the present wide range of applications of the method. They demonstrated for the first time the flexibility and power of the process, and its considerable potential for solving problems other than those in the field of structural mechanics, in which they had originally been applied.
Professor Zienkiewicz has received honours and academic recognition worldwide. In 1979 he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society, London, and he was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1989, for his distinguished services in research and education. He is a past member of the Council of the Institution of Civil Engineering. His connections with Hong Kong and China are close. For several years he has been a regular visitor to China to advise the Ministry of Education on developments in the country's universities. He has held visiting fellowships and professorships in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering at the University of Hong Kong, and in 1991 was the keynote speaker at conferences on computational mechanics and environmental hydraulics at the University.
In recognition of his services to engineering research, the University has resolved to confer upon him the degree of Doctor of Science honoris causa.
