In response to a proposal by Zhigang Suo in November 2005, the Executive Committee of the Applied Mechanics Division (AMD) of ASME has created a new Technical Committee on Integrated Structures. The main purpose is to provide a home at AMD for those who are working in the interdisciplinary areas involving applied mechanics and integrated materials/structures such as microelectronics and biomedical technologies. Read more here.

To forge the link between academia and industries, the committee will be co-chaired by industrial and academic members. For the first year, Jun He of Intel and Rui Huang (myself) have served as the co-chairs. As the 2006 ASME Congress (November 5-10) coming around the corner, we would like to draw your attention to our first activities at the congress.

• We have organized 3 sessions: AMD-2 (Wednesday, 3:45-5:15pm), AMD-11 (Friday, 2-3:30pm) , and AMD-12 (Friday, 3:45-5:15pm). As the newcomer, we did not get the best time slots, but we will have some good talks with speakers from both industry and academia. Some notable speakers are Reinhold Dauskardt (Stanford University), Neville Moody (Sandia), Xi Chen (Columbia University), Zhigang Suo (Harvard University), Paul Ho (University of Texas at Austin), Jun He (Intel), Xiao Hu Liu (IBM), David Bahr (Washington State University).

• On Thursday, November 9, we will have our first committee meeting (1-2pm). The meeting will be open to all, and we invite interested parties to join us in discussing our future activities. In particular, all our speakers are automatically members of the technical committee and are urged to attend the committee meeting.

• Among other issues that will be discussed at the committee meeting, we will solicit proposals to organize sessions in the 2007 ASME Congress (Seattle, WA). If you are interested, please prepare a one-page proposal including the number of sessions, the titles, and a short description. It is preferred that you send your proposal to one of us (Jun He or Rui Huang) by Wednesday, November 8.

• In addition to the ASME congresses, we are organizing a symposium at the 2007 summer meeting (Austin, Texas). The theme is again on Mechanics of integrated materials and structures in advanced technology (TK 16). We will post a formal Call-for-Papers separately. The deadline for abstract submission is November 30, 2006.