MechSE faculty team receives NCSA/IACAT fellowship

A proposal from MechSE professor Martin Ostoja-Starzewski and adjunct assistant professor Seid Koric has been selected for funding by the NCSA/IACAT* Fellows program.

The proposal is titled "Fractal Patterns in Fracture and Damage Phenomena." They will explore fractal patterns during 3-D elastic-plastic-brittle transitions, which have the potential to offer rapid assessment of inelastic states and damage in many common materials and structures.

The computational work will be done on the NCSA's sustained peta-scale system of Blue Waters, the famous supercomputer now open to select research on the University of Illinois campus.

Concurrently a faculty member at the Beckman Institute, Ostoja-Starzewski joined the MechSE faculty as a full professor in 2006. Prior to that, he was on the faculty at McGill University from 2001 to 2005, Georgia Tech from 1996 to 2000, Michigan State from 1990 to 1995, and Purdue University from 1985 to 1990. He received his Ph.D. and M.Eng. in mechanical engineering from McGill University and an Engineer degree in mechanical engineering from Cracow University of Technology.

He is an expert in stochastic solid mechanics, pursuing research in (thermo)mechanics and transport in random and fractal media; non-classical continuum mechanics and thermodynamics; scale effects in (non)linear elasticity, plasticity and fracture/damage in composites, polycrystals, and biological materials; random fields and stochastic finite elements; and MRI-based mechanics of traumatic brain injury.

Koric is the Senior Technical Lead for Industrial Project at NCSA. He has been an adjunct assistant professor in MechSE since 2010. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical and industrial engineering from Illinois in 2006, after earning an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Illinois in 1999 and a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Sarajevo in 1993. His main research is in biodata, including large-scale multiphysics modeling of complex engineering processes and sparse solver technologies on massively parallel machines.

*Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies / National Center for Supercomputing Applications.