MichelleLOyen's blog

A new report has been published on the "leaky pipeline" question:

A persistent problem. Traditional gender roles hold back female scientists 

I just stumbled on this very interesting discussion on why science graduate students should publish, regardless of their later career intentions.  I agree with the author on most points, but believe it really comes down to two things: (1) if you aren't going to communicate your results (both good and bad!) then you might as well have not bothered to do the work, and (2) becoming a good writer is a skill that every technical person will need in any career.

Since I am an alum of the University of Minnesota, when I was a PhD student I lived only a few blocks from the site of yesterday's catastrophic bridge collapse in Minneapolis.  The statics analysis of a truss is almost the first thing learned by every undergraduate engineering student, and appears to be relevant here.  It is interesting to see words like "fatigue crack" and "vibrations" in the news .  In light o

The 2007 Maurice A. Biot Medal for Poromechanics has been awarded during the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Conference held at Virginia Tech last Tuesday.



The 2007 Biot Medal winner is Dr. James R. Rice of Harvard University.



If you are interested in further information, such as citation of Dr. Rice's work, and photos, you can check this page:

http://www.olemiss.edu/sciencenet/poronet/medal.html

(cross-post to Biomch-L )

The 7th North American Workshop on Applications of the Physics of Porous Media will be held in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, November 2-6, 2007. This will be the 7th biennial meeting of researchers around the world who are interested in the phenomena associated with physics of fluid flow and deformation in porous media and its applications to a broad range of basic roblems encountered in geophysics, geomechanics, medical physics, and condensed matter physics.

Full details are available at the website:

An interesting blog discussion on the disappearance of fundamentals from teaching in Universities was brought to my attention.  It serves as an interesting reminder that we who are educators in the University system must be ever vigilent in planning mechanics curricula and changes to curriculum.  Should we be offering courses in the area of this month's jClub, "Nanomechanics"?  Should we drop classical courses that have stopped being interesting to the majority of students (and thus attract low numbers)?  Should we educate students explicitly in biomechanics without providing them a classical mechanics background?  These are the questions we are likely to face in the next few years as change continues to sweep across the university system, especialy in the US but elsewhere as well.  I believe that we as a community have a responsibility here to ensure that the high standards of the discipline are maintained through teaching of fundamentals and the passing along of these values to future generations!

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of seeing a mechanics seminar delivered "tag-team" by Ken Johnson and Jim Greenwood. (I know several people have thought I was a bit mad for jumping "across the pond" but there are really some amazing benefits of being part of the Cambridge Engineering faculty!)