Our Group of Appleid mechanics in Enviormental & Civil Engineering Department at Michigan State University has an openings for PhD positions to work on  Mechanics of Nano-composites  starting Spring 2015.

One research direction is modeling of nano reinforced materials, with combined theoretical and experimental efforts. Highly Stretchable/Flexible composites combines the leight weight of classical composites and mechanical properties of a polymer based composites, and thus do have a very broad biological applications. . 

Flexoelectricity is a size-dependent electromechanical mechanism coupling polarization and strain gradient. It exists in a wide variety of materials, and is most noticeable for nanoscale objects, where strain gradients are higher. Simulations are important to understand flexoelectricity because experiments at very small scales are difficult, and analytical solutions are scarce. Here, we computationally evaluate the role of flexoelectricity in the electromechanical response of linear dielectric solids in two-dimensions.

Job description:

Seeking a postdoctoral fellow to research on "In vivo  biomechanics of brain" using magnetic resonance imaging, tagging techniques and image processing techniques. 

See attached flyer and instructions to apply.

For those of you interested in a terse introductory guide to the Finite Element Method, you might find the latest book by my colleague at U.C. Berkeley, Tarek Zohdi, to be helpful:

The word "extreme" seems to be "trending" a lot these days, see the recent discussions on the new journal Extreme Mechanics Letters.

My collaborator Ruben Sevilla at Swansea and I were interested in very curved crack paths that develop in nature and have been replicated experimentally in thin films attached to elastic substrates.

Thermo-hydro-mechanics (THM) is a branch of mechanics aimed to predict how deformable porous media behave, while heat transfer and fluid transport simultaneously occur in the pores filled by liquid and/or gas. Understanding these multi-physical responses is important for a wide spectrum of modern engineering applications, such as tissue scaffolding, geothermal heating, mineral exploration and mining, hydraulic fracture, energy piles, tunneling with frozen soil and nuclear waste storage and management.

http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1PcEa6EHNeGWdB

Highlights:

Uniaxial tensile testing of rabbit vocal fold tissue.

Investigating the role of specimen shape on tensile testing of vocal fold tissue.

Development of a shape-specific finite element model to estimate elastic modulus.

Comparison of elastic moduli from shape-specific and generic-shape models.