Call for Abstract Submission to SES2016 Symposium C-5: Molecular, Cellular, and Tissue Mechanics

Dear Colleagues,

You are cordially invited to submit your one-page abstract to our Symposium C-5: Molecular, Cellular, and Tissue Mechanics for

The 53rd Annual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Science (SES2016) 

Date & Location:

University of Maryland (UMD) during 2-5 October 2016 at the College Park Marriott Hotel & Conference Center.

Guidelines for submission of Abstracts, as well as further information regarding the conference, may be found at the website http://ses2016.org/

Please click here to submit your abstract.

Deadline for submission of Abstracts is June 15, 2016. 

Co-organizers:

George Lykotrafitis, University of Connecticut, george.lykotrafitis@uconn.edu

Ying Li, University of Connecticut, yingli@engr.uconn.edu

Symposium Technical Description

Mechanics plays a very significant role in biological systems. For instance, cells actively sense their environment and respond to or send physical signals. Applied forces, geometry, elasticity, and chemistry of the extracellular matrix are important in several biological processes and pathologies. However, the structural complexity of biological systems sets up a major hurdle for the understanding of their behavior. Moreover, multiple spatial and temporal scales are typically involved due to the hierarchical structure and nested process in biological system. All these issues bring unprecedented challenges and also great opportunities to experimental, theoretical and computational molecular, cellular, and tissue mechanics. These challenges call for close collaborations between scientist from different fields including engineers, physicists, biologists, chemists, and material scientists.

The overarching goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers with a variety of backgrounds to exchange ideas, to team up for addressing grand challenge problems, or to initiate new areas of research. We propose three major themes under this symposium:

Tissue Mechanics: Constitutive modeling of biological tissues, experimental measurement of tissue properties, tissue remodeling, structure-function relations of tissue, numerical simulations in tissue mechanics, biological and disease applications of tissue mechanics, biomechanics of cartilage and arteries.

Cellular and subcellular Mechanics: Cell adhesion, cell motility, mechanical properties of single cells, constitutive and computational modeling of cells, single-cell mechanical testing, cell membrane mechanics, cell cytoskeleton and cell-extracellular matrix interactions, mechanotransduction in cells, morphogenesis, intracellular mechanics, multi-cellular structure formation and organization, cellular uptake of nanoparticles.

Molecular Mechanics: Deformation of DNA, RNA and proteins, analytic and computational analysis of biomolecules, mechanisms of mechanosensing and mechanotransduction, cell adhesion molecules, mechanics of subcellular structures and organelles, mechanics of endocytosis, viral budding, viral packaging, self-assembly of nanoparticles mediated by organic molecules.