{"id":1266,"date":"2021-06-21T16:03:04","date_gmt":"2021-06-21T20:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/case\/faculty\/james-guest\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T12:25:33","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T16:25:33","slug":"james-guest","status":"publish","type":"people","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/case\/faculty\/james-guest\/","title":{"rendered":"James Guest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>James K. Guest, a professor and the Hackerman Family Department Head of Civil and Systems Engineering, holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and serves as the associate director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Additive Manufacturing and Architected Materials (JAM<sup>2<\/sup>) and the Center for Integrated Structure-Materials Modeling and Simulation (CISMMS).<\/p>\n<p>Guest is an internationally recognized leader in the field of\u00a0topology optimization, an approach for automating and enabling discovery in computational design processes. His group develops algorithms for the design of structures, devices, and architected materials for a broad range of applications, including infrastructure, energy, biomedical, and aerospace applications. He and his group are credited with making fundamental advancements in design for manufacturability, design under uncertainty, and design for multifunctionality.<\/p>\n<p>Guest has received a number of awards, including the Engineering Mechanics Institute Leonardo da Vinci award and the American Society of Civil Engineers Walter L. Huber Research Prize. In 2025, Guest was named an i<span>naugural<\/span> Fellow of the International Society for Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization. He is also a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers&#8217; Engineering Mechanics Institute (ASME).<\/p>\n<p>Sponsors of his research have included the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the Army Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Science Foundation, as well as industry.<\/p>\n<p>Guest is currently serving as past secretary-general for the International Society for Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, and is a past chair of the technical committee on Optimal Structural Design for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Structural Engineering Institute. He also is a member of the Computational Mechanics Committee of the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI), and a member of the Design Automation Committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is on the editorial board of the journals <em>Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization<\/em> and <em>Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering<\/em> and serves as a reviewer for more than 30 technical journals.<\/p>\n<p>Guest received his bachelor\u2019s degree in civil engineering systems from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. He then studied at Princeton University, where he received a master\u2019s degree in civil engineering and operations research in 2001, a master\u2019s degree in civil and environmental engineering in 2002, and a PhD in civil and environmental engineering in 2005. He joined the Whiting School of Engineering faculty in 2005.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","class_list":["post-1266","people","type-people","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>James Guest - Department of Civil &amp; Systems Engineering<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/faculty\/james-guest\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"James Guest - Department of Civil &amp; Systems Engineering\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"James K. 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