Professor John W. Hutchinson is a member of the US National Academies of Engineering and Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. He is one of the leading experts in the mechanics of thin film systems, with a number of highly cited, seminal journal papers on the subject. Hutchinson is credited with generating many of the conceptual developments in this field, as well as illustrations of those concepts to applications such as microelectronics, thermal barrier coatings, microfluidic devices and hypersonics.