 The School of Engineering mourns the loss of talented educator prolific author, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus Irving H. Shames.
 Dr. Shames joined the UB faculty in 1962 and retired from the faculty in 1993; after which he joined the faculty of George Washington University.
Shames’ distinguished lifelong career was marked by continuous achievement, prodigious publication output, and numerous awards. Among his many and outstanding accomplishments is the educating of two generations of UB Engineering undergraduate students in the subject of Mechanics. In 1978, he received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. The State University Board of Trustees’s conferred its most prestigious system-level distinction to Shames in 1980, when he became a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor. In 1993, Shames received the Engineering Dean's Award (the School’s highest award), and in 1995, he won the UB Engineering Alumni Association’s Engineer of the Year Award for career-long contributions to engineering. Shames’s distinctive teaching abilities were recognized by Tau Beta Pi’s New York Nu Chapter, which selected him Professor of the Year twice (1964, 1989), for virtue in teaching and leadership.
Dr. Shames’ excellence in teaching was complemented by his highly regarded and well circulated textbooks, including: Mechanics of Fluids; Mechanics of Deformable Solids; Engineering Mechanics – Statics; Engineering Mechanics – Dynamics; Introduction to Statics; Solid Mechanics – A Variational Approach; Introduction to Solid Mechanics; Energy and Finite Elements in Structural Mechanics; and Elastic and Inelastic Stress Analysis. These volumes have collectively sold well over half a million copies. Dr. Shames was also editor of McGraw Hill’s Advanced Engineering Mechanics Series.
CSEE’s SUNY Distinguished Professor George C. Lee, Dean for much of Professor Shames’ tenure, remembers his colleague Irving H. Shames as “truly a Distinguished Teaching Professor – the very best engineering mechanics professor in and out of the classroom. He wrote outstanding textbooks, displayed a compassionate personality towards the students, and was blessed with unusually effective communication skills, unmatched by others.”
Irving H. Shames was devoted to his family--late wife Sheila, children Lisa and Bruce, and grandchildren Adrienne, Sara, Andrew, Gabrielle and Charles. To learn more about Dr. Shames’ impressive contributions to engineering and education, please see the abbreviated CV that we have compiled.
Please join us in commemorating Dr. Shames. We invite you to share your recollections at a memorial page in his honor.
Also, the School is accepting gifts for a new SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Irving H. Shames Memorial Scholarship Fund. Contributions to the fund can be made online, or by mailing a check payable to the “University of Buffalo Foundation” to:
University at Buffalo Foundation
Please indicate “Shames Memorial Scholarship Fund” in the note field.
Office of University Development c/o Cindy Johannes P.O. Box 730 Buffalo, NY 14226-0730. Sincerely,
 Robert E. Barnes Senior Associate Dean, School of Engineering & Applied Sciences 
Dr. Shames (left) receiving the 1995 Engineer of the Year Award from UB Engineering Alumni Association Committee Chair Craig M. Forget (BS ’92 MS ’96 CIE); below are some of his engineering textbook contributions.
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