Professor Ahmet S. Cakmak, a specialist in Engineering Mechanics and Earthquake Engineering, has had a successful career spanning forty years as an engineer, educator and administrator. Strating with a B.S. in Engineering from his home country, Turkey, he has undertaken graduate studies at Princeton and Columbia Universities which led to a Ph.D. in 1962. Following his Ph.D., Dr. Cakmak joined Princeton University in the Department of Civil Engineering in 1963 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate and Full Professorships respectively in 1969 and 1972. He has served the Department as Chairman from 1971 to 1980 and 1994 to 1997, served the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences as Associate Dean during the period 1981 to 1986, and retired in 2000. Dr. Cakmak now holds the title of Professor of Civil Engineering, Emeritus, at Princeton University.
 
Dr. Cakmak's research is in the general area of Applied Mechanics and includes work in thermal elasticity, viscoelasticity of thermo-rheological solids, continuum mechanics, structural dynamics for both deterministic and stochastic systems. Dr. Cakmak has also contributed as researcher, engineer, educator  and administrator, to the solution of practical problems in his consulting work, in particular in the areas of structures and earthquake phenomena.
 
Dr. Cakmak served as visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology, Kyoto University (Japan), Southampton University (United Kingdom), and Bogazici University (Turkey). Editor of 18 books on earthquake engineering and author of over 130 technical papers, Professor Cakmak has been a regular contributor to journals in his field, including the Journal of Applied Mechanics, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and the International Journal of Engineering Science. He is also the founding editor of the International Journal of Soil Dynamics and co-author of a textbook, Computational and Applied Mathematics for Engineering Analysis.