Paul Heyliger was awarded his Ph.D. in Engineering Science and Mechanics from Virginia Tech in 1986. He joined the Civil Engineering Department at Colorado State University in 1988 following a two-year post-doctoral appointment at the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado. He has held visiting professor and visiting researcher appointments at NASA-Lewis Research Center, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Stuttgart. He is currently Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University, where he studies computational mechanics of materials and structures.