Maciej S. Kumosa is a materials scientist and academic. He holds the title of John Evans Professor at the University of Denver, and is the director of the Center for Novel High Voltage/Temperature Materials and Structures (HVT). Kumosa's research interests involve analyzing advanced materials at multiple scales, both experimentally and numerically, for applications in electrical, aerospace, and other fields under extreme operating conditions. Kumosa serves as an Editorial Board Member for Composites Science and Technology, Structural Durability & Health Monitoring, and Fibers.
Early life Maciej Kumosa was born on July 13, 1953, in Warsaw, Poland, to a family with teaching, medicine, and farming backgrounds. His father, Dr. Stefan Kumosa, was a well-respected physician in Słupca, a small town in the middle of communist Poland with approximately 5,000 residents during that period. At age five, Kumosa was relocated from Warsaw to Slupca, where he received his elementary and high school education from primary school number 1 and Marshal Józef Piłsudski High School in 1968 and 1972, respectively.
Education Kumosa earned his Masters's degree in Applied Mechanics and Materials Science from the Technical University of Wroclaw, in 1978. He continued his studies at the same university, completing his Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics and Materials Science in 1982.
Career In 1981, Kumosa began his career as a senior research assistant in the Institute of Materials Science and Applied Mechanics at the Technical University of Wroclaw and was appointed as an assistant professor in 1983. He then served as a senior research associate at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 1990, followed by an appointment as an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI) in Portland from 1990 until 1998. In 1996, he joined the University of Denver as a research professor in the Department of Engineering and was later promoted to the roles of associate professor and full professor. Since 2006, he has been serving as a John Evans Professor at the University of Denver (DU). He retired as an academic in 2024. Kumosa was the chair of the Mechanical and Materials Engineering (MME) Department at DU from 2007 to 2009 and later served as the director of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering from 2007 to 2012. Since 2014, he has been serving as the center director of the National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Novel High Voltage/Temperature Materials and Structures (the HVT Center). The first Phase of the HVT Center was completed on September 30, 2024. During its 10 years of operation, the Center graduated 42 PHD and 15 master's students and published 205 journal papers at its four academic sites.
Research Kumosa's research focused on advanced materials under extreme conditions for electrical and aerospace applications, using experimental and numerical methods to optimize performance. He has authored publications spanning the fields of composites, materials science, applied physics, applied mechanics, and general science, including IEEE journals, conference proceedings, engineering magazines, and national research reports. Kumosa's research has been funded by federal and private sponsors, including the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of Energy (Headquarters), NASA, the Bonneville Power Administration, and the Western Area Power Administration. His main private research sponsors have been the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Electric Power Research Institute, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the Alabama Power Company, and Pacific Gas & Electric.
Graduate research at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology As part of his Ph.D. research, Kumosa investigated both numerically and experimentally the initiation of cracking by mechanical twins in silicon iron. He used an anisotropic Eshelby approach to predict the stresses required to initiate cracks by terminated mechanical twins and to determine the directions of shear deformations associated with mechanical twining. Kumosa started experimenting with thin-walled Glass Reinforced Polymer (GRP) composite structures by subjecting them to internal pressure to determine the effects of multiaxial loads in the initiation of damage in the composites. His mentors at that time were Leszek Golaski and Waclaw Kasprzak.
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