Myklestad was employed in various technical capacities by AiResearch, North American Aviation, Westinghouse Electric, Fairbanks Morse, and Bell Helicopter Company.

Nils O Myklestad was born in 1909 in Williston, North Dakota, United States but returned with his family to Norway where he was schooled and spent his childhood and youth.

In 1940 N. O. Myklestad was appointed Assistant Professor of Machine Design at Illinois Institute of Technology where he served until 1942.

From 1942 to 1945 he was the Research Associate in charge of Vibration and Flutter, Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.

In 1944, he published “A New Method of Calculating Natural Modes of Uncoupled Bending Vibration of Airplane Wings and Other Types of Beams”.

This approach while more complex, is similar to methods developed earlier for torsional systems, and in the introductory sections of Myklestad's article the path-finding work of Heinrich Holzer is credited.

In any event, the practical importance of the Myklestad Method established a worldwide reputation for its author and has been, and continues to be to this day, widely used for calculation of natural frequencies and normal modes of rotating and nonrotating beam structures.

[12][13] During the time he was employed at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, he extended the Myklestad Method to include coupled bending-torsion vibration.

[14] and also developed one of the first efficient and numerically accurate methods of calculating the flutter speed of a multi-mass airplane wing model.

In 1947, Myklestad accepted a position as Professor of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois where he supervised a number of master's theses and PhD dissertations.

The author of a number of significant technical articles, he also published four important text books on engineering mechanics.

Myklestad Award presented every two years in recognition of a major innovative contribution to vibration engineering.

N. O. Myklestad, "A Tabular Method of Calculating Helicopter Blade Deflections and Moments," Transactions of American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1947.

[DOI: 10.2514/3.3988] ASME Myklestad Award Illinois Institute of Technology California Institute of Technology - Thesis Supervision - 1944 University of Illinois, 1954 - Trustees' Minutes University of Texas System, 1968 - Membership in the Graduate Faculty Contents of Theodore von Karmen's Library Gravity Research Foundation Award, 1967