Blog posts

A postdoctoral position is available starting immediately in the Johnson Research Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The position will involve theoretical and computational modeling of the mechanics of soft materials/flexible electronics/adhesion, with applications in photonics and energy storage.  The work will involve significant interactions with experimental groups in the Department of Materials Science at the University of Illinois.  Applicants should send a CV with a list of references to htj [at]

At the invitation of Yonggang Huang, I’ll give 4-hour lectures at the NSF Summer Institute Course on the Mechanics of Soft Materials.   I attach the slides of the lectures, to be given on Monday, 10 May 2010.  An abstract of the lectures follows.

I welcome and encourage all my fellow imechanicians to participate in the international conference being organised at Thapar university patiala,  punjab, india during november 2010.

The details regarding the conference and research paper format are attached.

for further queries log on to www.thapar.edu, or http://www.thapar.edu/news-eventDet.asp?id=97 or email at

I am inspired by Mike Ciavarella's recent post on the Shape of the Eiffel Tower to share a bit of my own obsession with the Tower...

I am trying to model a simple 2-D consolidation test in Abaqus.  I am essentially applying a distributed line load across the top of a square soil mesh.  The excess pore pressures that are generated are plotting as negatives.  Is this the expected sign convention for a 2-phase soil/water mesh in compression?