Margins
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved
W. Michael Lai is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and Orthpaedic Bioengineering at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D in Engineering Mechanics in 1962 from the University of Michigan. Between 1962 and 1986, he was a faculty member in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1987 with a joint appointment between the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. He served as Chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Department from 1996 to 2002 and became Professor Emeritus in 2004. His research field has been in Orthopaedic Bioengineering with a special interest in soft tissue mechanics. Many of his publications have been in the constitutive modeling of articular cartilage for which he received the ASME Melville Medal in 1982 and the ASME Lissner Medal in 2001. The triphasic model considers the tissue as consisting of three phases: a solid phase, a fluid phase and an ionic phase with two ionic species. The model has been used to study the mechanical and the electromechanical behavior of the tissue including the signal transduction problems in chondrocytes . He is a Fellow of ASME and a founding Fellow of the American Institute for Biomedical and Biological Engineering (1995). At Columbia, he has received a Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award from the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association (2000). Books
