Invited by Prof Pengwan Chen, ProfDaniel Rittel from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology visited BIT in July 2015. He gave a series of lectures on "Introductory Course on Failure of Materials and Fracture Mechanics" and two seminars.

As of today, D. Rittel holds the Zandman Chair in Experimental Mechanics, heads the Materials Mechanics Center. He is also the Deputy Senior Vice President (Vice Provost) of Technion. D. Rittel was the Clark B. Millikan Visiting Professor in Aeronautics (2007) at Caltech and incumubent of a Catedra de Excellencia at UC3M (Madrid) in 2012. And recently he was awarded the prestigious 2015 Angiola Gili è Cataldo Agostinelli international prize, by the Academy of Sciences of Torino (Italy) in the Applied and Theoretical Mechanics category. D. Rittel holds a PhD in Materials Science (1988) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He spent 2 years as a postdoc at Yale University working on the fracture of tungsten base heavy alloys, followed by 3.5 years at Ecole Polytechnique (France), working on experimental dynamic fracture mechanics. He joined Technion (Mechanical Engineering) in 1994 where he founded the Dynamic Fracture Laboratory.

Throughout the years, D. Rittel has developed expertise in the many aspects of dynamic failure, including fracture mechanics, constitutive behavior, dynamic failure mechanisms and numerical modeling. D. Rittel is also active in the field of Structural Health Monitoring. He is a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM). D. Rittel’s interest is in the thermomechanics and physics of dynamic failure with regard to dynamic fragmentation, fracture, adiabatic shear banding and hysteretic heating. As of today, he has co-authored about 115 journal publications. Dr. Rittel is also Associate Editor of Experimental Mechanics, Mechanics of Materials and the International Journal of Engineering Science.