About “Silvia Budday”

Silvia Budday, currently a Full Professor heading the Institute of Continuum Mechanics and Biomechanics (LKM), studied Mechanical Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where she graduated with one of the four best Bachelor’s degrees in 2011 and the best Master’s degree of a female student in 2013. During her Master’s studies, she spent one year abroad at Purdue University, Indiana, USA, for which she received an international scholarship by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). She was also a scholar of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. She did her PhD on “The Role of Mechanics during Brain Development” at FAU supervised by Prof. Paul Steinmann in close collaboration with Prof. Ellen Kuhl at Stanford University and Prof. Gerhard Holzapfel at Graz University of Technology. She finished her PhD in December 2017 with “summa cum laude” and was awarded the GACM Best PhD Award (German Association for Computational Mechanics) and the ECCOMAS Best PhD Award for one of the two best PhD theses in the field of Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering in Europe in 2017. Furthermore, she received the Bertha Benz-Prize from the Daimler und Benz Stiftung as a woman visionary pioneer in engineering, and the 2017 Acta Journals Students Award. In July 2018, she received an Emerging Talents Initiative (ETI) Grant, and in October 2018 an Emerging Fields Initiative (EFI) Grant by the FAU. Since April 2019, she is leading a research group in the Emmy Noether-Programme by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on BRAIn mechaNIcs ACross Scales (BRAINIACS). In 2021, she was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Prize by the DFG and BMBF and the Richard-von-Mises-Prize by the International Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM). In 2023, she received an ERC Starting Grant for her project “Mechanics-augmented brain surgery (MAGERY)”. Her work focuses on experimental and computational soft tissue biomechanics with special emphasis on brain mechanics and the relationship between brain structure and function.