René de Borst

René de Borst is a Dutch civil engineer born in 1958 who is known for his work on computational mechanics and fracture mechanics. He took his master's degree in civil engineering at Delft University of Technology in 1982, and his thesis contained the original version of PLAXIS, a finite element code that is now widely used for computations in geotechnical engineering. He began his career at TNO, where he laid foundations for plasticity, smeared crack models and advanced solution techniques in the DIANA finite element package used to analyse concrete structures. After a doctorate at Delft in 1986 he held professorships at Delft and Eindhoven, was Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Glasgow from 2012 to 2015, and since 2016 has held the Centenary Chair of Civil Engineering at the University of Sheffield. His modelling of concrete, soils, composites and rubbers matters to civil, structural and aerospace engineering. He received the Spinoza Prize in 1999 and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.