SES Conference Draws Record Attendance

This October more than 500 scientists and engineers from around the world gathered at the University of Illinois for the 2008 Annual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Science (SES), a leading interdisciplinary forum that fosters the exchange of ideas among various engineering disciplines as well as physics, chemistry, mathematics, and related scientific fields. More than 180 students also attended the conference, which included an annual student presentation competition in which 16 finalists competed for three awards.

The three-day meeting, which was held October 12 through 15 at the new I-Hotel and Conference Center, featured more than 30 symposia on such subjects as advanced materials, complex fluids, computational and multiscale modeling, and applied mathematics. Plenary lectures by Subra Suresh, Dean of the School of Engineering and the Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Richard James, Russell J. Penrose Professor and Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota; and A.P.S. Selvadurai, William Scott Professor and James McGill Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics at McGill University, were well attended as was the special keynote lecture on "Composites Research for Marine Applications by Dr. Yapa Rajapakse of the Office of Naval Research.

A reception and banquet on October 14 featured an awards program as well as entertainment by the local singing group, "The Girls Next Door." Professor James received the 2008 William Prager Medal in recognition of his groundbreaking research on active materials, which includes 30 years of made outstanding contributions to continuum mechanics and applied mathematics that have significantly advanced understanding in many disciplines including solid mechanics, structural mechanics and materials science. Professor Suresh received the A.C. Eringen Medal in recognition of his diverse scholarly contributions as a researcher, educator and academic innovator. These include seminal contributions to materials science and mechanics through experiments, theory and simulations, many of which have inspired researchers in many branches of engineering science with applications to structural, functional and biological materials.

The 2008 SES Medal was awarded posthumously to Anthony Merrill Spencer, who was the Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Mechanics at the University of Nottingham in England and Fellow of the Royal Society. Professor Spencer passed away two days after being notified about his award. "Tony's contributions [to finite elasticity, invariant and tensor function theory, plasticity, granular materials, composites and anisotropic materials] resulted in a lasting imprint of his ability to see the essence of a problem and to present the material in a form that can be appreciated by engineers, mathematicians and material scientists alike," SES President Professor John Bassani, said before welcoming Professor Spencer's wife, Margaret, to receive the award in her husband's name. The following morning, Professor Selvaduri gave the plenary lecture in Spencer's honor.

During their visit, meeting guests had the opportunity to tour several world-class interdisciplinary research centers, including the Institute for Genomic Biology, the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) and the Beckman Institute.

Faculty at the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering (MechSE) played a major role in organizing the conference. Professor Harley Johnson was the general chair, and Professor Iwona Jasiuk was the technical program chair. Meanwhile, more than a dozen faculty from MechSE as well as the departments of Aerospace Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Physics and Materials Science and Engineering served as members of the local organizing committee, and an additional 60 individuals from the University of Illinois and many other institutions served on the technical program committee.