Call for Abstracts: WCCM 2018, New York, minisymposium 521: Computational Mechanics of Soft Materials in Medicine

Dear Colleagues,

We encourage you to contribute an abstract to the minisymposium “Computational Mechanics of Soft Materials in Medicine” (Session ID: 521) at the World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM 2018) in New York City from July 22-27th, 2018.

This symposium will focus on the computational modeling of soft materials and their interactions with biological entities for application in medicine. We are particularly interested in materials that can be functionalized to react to external stimuli and/or change their mechanical and chemical properties substantially at room temperature. These include, for instance, hydrogels, liquid crystals, granular materials, foams, vesicles, polymersomes, biological cells, extracellular matrices, blood, etc.

The symposium welcomes presentations that discuss applications of computational mechanics to not only better understand the behavior of soft materials but also to functionalize them for targeted medical applications such as tissue engineering, drug delivery, tissue adhesives, soft robotics, implants, etc. The symposium will thus provide a forum that stimulate discussions regarding computational challenges owing to the fact that applications of interests typically exhibit complex and nonlinear responses due to inherent large deformations, chemo-mechanical coupling, heterogeneous and anisotropic material properties, multiscale, fluid-structural interactions, and other factors. Topics include but are not limited to computational mechanics and modeling of: novel hydrogels and hydrogel-based structures/devices, 3D printed tissue scaffolds, active cytoskeleton, biomembranes and living cells, liquid crystals, drug delivery systems (such as nanoparticles, nanoparticle-cell membrane interactions), proteins, macromolecular assemblies, fluid-structure interactions in biological systems, and tissue growth and tissue/organ morphogenesis.

Organizers:

Frank Vernerey, University of Colorado at Boulder

Hongyan Yuan, The University of Rhode Island

Abstract submission is open and will remain open until December 31, 2017. 

Conference website: http://www.wccm2018.org/