SofTMech

Speaker Spotlight: Anna Pandolfi from Politecnico di Milano 

Anna is a Professor of Structural Mechanics and Solid Mechanics at the Politecnico di Milano, where she was hired in 1995 as assistant professor; since 1996 Anna Pandolfi has held a Visiting Associate Position at Caltech, Pasadena CA, USA. She is the editor in Chief of Meccanica (Springer) and is on the Editorial Boards of six international journals. She has been an Elected Member of the Euromech Council from 2016 to 2021. She served as coordinator of the Italian Group of Computational Mechanics (GIMC) from 2015 to 2019.

Author or coauthor of more than 90 publications in international peer-reviewed journals and of other 50 scientific works, her majorscientific contributions to the scientific research are in the field of computational mechanics, with the development of advanced fracture tracking techniques (cohesive elements, eigenerosion), particle methods for the discretization of solids and fluids, a new concept concrete with attenuation properties (metaconcrete), multiscale material models for porous brittle materials (brittle damage) used to simulate fracking. A second field of intensive research is biomechanics of soft tissues, applied in particular to the behavior of active tissues, muscles, intestines, and eyes.

Anna will be speaking at 2pm on day 1 of the workhop on

 "A stochastic model of the collagen microstructure"

 Speaker Spotlight: Roger Kamm from Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Roger is the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where he has served on the faculty since 1978. Kamm has long been instrumental in developing research activities at the interface of biology and mechanics, formerly in cell and molecular mechanics, and now in engineered living systems.  Current interests are in developing models of healthy and diseased organ function using microfluidic technologies, with a focus on vascularization in the context of metastatic cancer and neurological diseases.  Kamm has fostered biomechanics as Chair of the US National Committee on Biomechanics and of the World Council on Biomechanics.  Kamm is the 2010 recipient of the ASME Lissner Medal and the 2015 recipient of the Huiskes Medal (European Society of Biomechanics), both for lifetime achievements, and is the inaugural recipient of the ASME Nerem Medal for mentoring and education. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering. Kamm is co-founder of two companies, Cardiovascular Technologies and AIM Biotech, a manufacturer of microfluidic systems for 3D culture.

Roger will be giving the openining Keynote talk at the workshop at 9.30am on Wednesday 7th June on

"The Role of Mechanobiology in Vasculogenesis"

Speaker Spotlight: Gerhard Holzapfel from Graz University of Technology

Gerhard is a Professor of Biomechanics and Head of the Institute of Biomechanics at Graz University of Technology (TUG), Austria, since 2007. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, and Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Until 2013 he was Professor of Biomechanics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, for 9 years (7 years as an Adjunct Professor). After his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in Graz he received an Erwin-Schrödinger Scholarship for foreign countries to be a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (1993-95). He achieved his Habilitation at TU Vienna in 1996 and received a START-Award in 1997, which is the most prestigious research award in Austria for young scientists. In the following years (1998-2004) he was the Head of a research group on "Computational Biomechanics" at TUG.  Among several awards and honors in the past years he is listed in "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014" (Thomas Reuters), he received the Erwin Schrödinger Prize 2011 from the Austrian Academy of Sciences for his lifetime achievements, and he was awarded the 2021 William Prager Medal and the 2021 Warner T. Koiter Medal.

Professor Holzapfel’s research includes experimental and computational biomechanics and mechanobiology with an emphasis on soft biological tissues, the cardiovascular system including blood vessels in health and disease, therapeutic interventions such as balloon angioplasty and stent implantation, polarized light and second-harmonic imaging microscopy, magnetic resonance imaging and medical image processing; nonlinear continuum mechanics, constitutive (multi-scale) modeling of solids at finite strains such as cross-linked actin networks, growth and remodeling, nonlinear finite element methods, fracture and material failure.

Professor Holzapfel has authored a graduate textbook entitled “Nonlinear Solid Mechanics. A Continuum Approach for Engineering” (John Wiley & Sons), and co-edited seven books. He contributed chapters to 25+ other books, and published 250+ peer-reviewed journal articles. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the International Journal “Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology” (Springer). His h-index is 93 (according to Google Scholar).

Gerhard will give his presentation at 9am on day 2, Thursday 8th June

"Multiscale Modeling of Collagenous Tissues:Connecting Phenomena at the Nano, Micro and Macro Levels"

Speaker Spotlight: Richard Clayton from the University of Sheffield

Richard is Professor of Computational Physiology at the University of Sheffield. After completing a degree in Applied Physics at Durham University, he embarked on a PhD based at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne and this provided valuable experience of collecting data in the clinical setting. He remained at the Freeman Hospital for a further 9 years funded by the British Heart Foundation, with a research interest around the mechanisms of heart rhythm disorders. A period at The University of Leeds, again funded by the British Heart Foundation, enabled him to develop an interest in computational models of electrical activity in the heart, and this was followed by a move to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield in 2003. His research interests continue to focus on understanding electrical activity in the heart using experimental and clinical data and images, combined with computational models of structure and function. In recent years he has become particularly interested in methods to embed uncertainty and variability in these models, and this will be the theme of his talk.

l Engineers. His research has been awarded the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland medal for best bioengineering research in Ireland on two occasions, in addition to the Engineers Ireland medal for biomedical engineering research on two occasions. In 2015 he was awarded the NUIG President’s Award for Research Excellence. He has delivered 16 invited/keynote lectures at leading international conferences. In 2017 he was appointed as Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Graz and as Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He held a visiting faculty position at the University of Cambridge in 2018.  He has performed collaborative research with ten industry partners and six internationally leading clinical institutes in the fields of vascular, cardiac and orthopaedic biomechanics and medical device analysis. He is the Programme Director for the BE Degree in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Galway. Prior to his faculty appointment at NUIG he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara, and at the National Centre for Biomedical Engineering Science. He holds a PhD in Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering and a M.Eng.Sc. in Hydrological Engineering and he has completed twelve graduate level modules in these fields of study.      

"Modelling the active contractility of cells and soft tissue"

Speaker Spotlight: Colin Berry 

First published: 4 May 2023