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By George A. Hazelrigg, National Science Foundation

I have been an NSF program director for 18 years. During this time, I have personally administered the review of some 3,000 proposals and been involved in the review of perhaps another 10,000. Through this experience, I have come to see that often there are real differences between winning proposals and losing proposals. The differences are clear. Largely, they are not subjective differences or differences of quality; to a large extent, losing proposals are just plain missing elements that are found in winning proposals. Although I have known this for some time, a recent experience reinforced it.

I posted this survey in Applied Mechanics Research and Researchers on 16 April 2006, based on a survey of Web of Science. A paper making the list satisfied the following conditions:

• It is in the areas of solid mechanics, mechanics of materials, or computational mechanics, and
• It has at least 1000 citations.

This list may not be complete. If anyone finds a missing entry, please leave a comment below.

The cited number has been updated up to 18 Dec. 2006.

Journal of Materials (JOM) of The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS) is running a survey on the greatest moments in materials science and engineering; the voting deadline is January 5, 2007.

I am chairing the search for a new faculty member in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh. As you will see in the ad below, the position is in the Biomaterials area. I would like to encourage more applications from candidates with interests in biomechanics (so I will have good opportunities to collaborate), and would like to invite applicants from this forum. If you are not personally in a position to apply, please pass the announcement along to anyone you know who might be suitable.

It is well known that metals are hardened by deformation and soften by annealing. How about nanostructured metals? Can we reply on conventional metal-working lore?

The Max Planck Society (MPS) aims at promoting young international scientists by enabling them to perform their research (in all fields pursued by the MPS) at a Max Planck Institute of their choice.

The MPS offers Independent Junior Research Group Leader positions (W2; equivalent to associate professor level without tenure) granted for a period of 5 years with the option for prolonging twice for 2 years. The deadline for application is January 10, 2007.

Hello everyone,

Professor Suo suggested that I share this speculative idea that I once posted on Applied Mechanics News here on iMechanica!

In the future, we would like to reach out to children as early as their elementary school years to get them excited about topics drawn from Applied Mechanics. One approach to this goal takes inspiration from the successful "Le main a la pate", or "hands-in-dough", program in France (http://www.lamap.fr/ ), but extends the idea of hands-on science to take advantage of the internet.