Dear Colleague,



The Sixth M.I.T. Conference on Computational Fluid and Solid Mechanics will be held in June 2011 at M.I.T.

The theme of the Conference is "Solids & Structures", and the topic is interpreted in a very broad way.



The Abstracts for full papers to be published in Computers & Structures are due January 31, 2010.

please see http://www.sixthmitconference.org

The University Paris-Est Marne la Vallée, France, invites applications for two tenure-track faculty positions in multiscale computational mechanics, as assistant professor level, for September 2010 start date. The candidates will be hosted by the Laboratory of Multiscale Computational Mechanics (Laboratoire Modélisation et Simulation Multi Echelle, MSME UMR 8208 CNRS). Successful candidates are expected to teach at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and carry out a research program with potential collaborations at the European and International level.

If you are upset about promotion system, look at what two italian friends proved recently, which was immediately popular before the paper publication, also because they proved random promotion is more efficient!

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSITANT – HYBRID SOLAR PANEL The Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University seeks applications for a position as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant. A Postdoctoral Research Assistant is a junior level research position and works under the supervision of a faculty member in the department.  As a postdoctoral research assistant the incumbent will work to further the research of the laboratory, and occasionally may be asked to supervise student projects related to the research and other topics within the scope of the group.

Iain Finnie passed away in December. At the time he was the James Fife Professor Emeritus U.C. Berkeley Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.



Iain had an amazing number of contributions spanning diverse area of mechanics. To the best of my recollection:



He published some great early work on the shear angle in metal cutting in 1953.

He published the first book on creep in 1959 with William Heller.

He published a (the?) pioneering paper on erosion in 1960.

 (in Computational Methods for Microstructure-Property Relationships," Springer. Edited by Somnath Ghosh and Dennis Dimiduk)

Dislocation mediated continuum plasticity: case studies on modeling scale dependence, scale-invariance, and directionality of sharp yield-point

Claude Fressengeas, Amit Acharya, Armand Beaudoin

Closing date for receipt of applications: 30 January 2010You will join a research project “Optimise blast resistance of novel composites made with fibre metal laminates (FMLs)” sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust. The project will be jointly supervised with Prof. Cantwell who is an expert on testing of novel composites. The project is to develop comprehensive finite element models capable of simulating various deformation and failure modes relating to composite features of FMLs subjected to extreme loading conditions.

A research position at postdoctoral level is currently available in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney. The position is full-time fixed term for 2.5 years; further extension may be possible depending on the performance and availability of funding. The appointee will be working in a project funded by the Australian Research Council on the study of quasi-brittle fracture. Briefly, the project aims at understanding fracture and fragmentation processes in quasi-brittle materials, which is critical to the prediction of natural catastrophes and structural failures.

It is well known thatdislocations in FCC metals are composed of partial dislocations separated bystacking faults.  When consideringthe reactions of dislocations with each other, such as in DD simulations, it is necessary to determine therelative positions of the partials in order to correctly describe theconfigurations that are created in the reactions.  Here we describe a geometric method for correctly determiningthe relative positions of the partials. The results we obtain can also be found by applying an axiom, or rule,given in the book by Hirth and Lothe. At the end