Job description
A Postdoctoral Fellow position is available in the Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory
(CSML) in the Division of Physical Sciences and Engineering at King Abdullah University of
Science and Technology (KAUST). Candidates with experience in one or more of the following
research areas are encouraged to apply:
(1) Constitutive modeling of materials (metals, biological tissues, polymers, gels, soft active
materials, …etc.)
(2) Large scale computing and software design with experience in computational mechanics
Qualifications
A successful candidate must have a Ph.D. in the field of computational mechanics with
experience in one or more of the aforementioned areas of research. Programming experience on
a UNIX platform is a must.
Appointment, salary and benefits
Appointment period: One year, renewable annually for a maximum appointment of three years.
Salary: Competitive, no tax paid to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Other benefits: Free housing, medical, dental, free schools for children, air transportation to
KAUST.
Contacts, application material and deadlines
Interested applicants should send a detailed C.V. with at least three professional references to
Professor Tamer El-Sayed at tamer.elsayed [at] kaust.edu.sa
The position will remain open until filled.
About CSML (http://www.kaust.edu.sa/tamerelsayed)
The focus of the Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory (CSML) at KAUST is to develop
multi-scale constitutive models for metals and soft materials. The following summarizes current
research activities:
• Development of multi-scale constitutive models for nanocrystalline metals. The developed
models are capable of capturing distinctive features of nanocrystalline materials, such as the
grain size dependence both in classical Hall-Petch form for greater grain sizes (> 10-25nm)
and inverse Hall-Petch for finer grain sizes (< 10-25 nm).
• Development of constitutive models intended to reproduce damage in polymers caused by
high strain rate loading. Applications include the design of high-strength composites for
impact mitigation.
• Development of constitutive models for soils and rocks taking into account multiphase and
mixedphase flow, grain-grain and grain-liquid interaction under high-pressure, hightemperature
conditions. Applications include Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR).
• Development of constitutive models intended to reproduce the damage of biological soft
tissues induced by bubble cavitation, growth, and coalescence. Potential benefits to industry,
the medical and defense communities include: the ability to derive a sound mechanistic and
quantitative understanding of traumatic head injury leading to improvements in operative
management and post-traumatic care; and the ability to predict the lethality of traumatic injury
to the head leading to improvements in helmet and other protective head-gear design and
increased survivability during accidents.
The developed constitutive models are invaluable parts of predictive simulation methods, which
can be used in designing tailor-made materials with superior properties. The long-term goal is to
reduce the amount of experimental efforts, which are expensive and time consuming with the
developed simulation tools.
About KAUST (http://www.kaust.edu.sa/)
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is an international, graduate-level
research university located on the Red Sea in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Dedicated to
inspiring a new age of scientific achievement that will benefit the region and the world, KAUST
exemplifies the future of world-class research. It is the vibrant home to an international
community of students, faculty and staff, researchers, and families, situated in a unique Red Sea
coastal location near Thuwal, 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Jeddah – Saudi Arabia’s second
largest city. The total area of the self-contained community spans more than 36 million square
meters, including a unique coral reef ecosystem that the University will preserve as a marine
sanctuary. KAUST houses the Shaheen Supercomputer, a 16-rack IBM Blue Gene/P System,
equipped with 4 gigabytes of memory per node and capable of 222 teraflops — or 222 trillion
floating-point-operations — per second, making KAUST’s campus in Thuwal the site of one of the
world’s fastest supercomputers. KAUST is also connected directly into the worldwide research
networks, running 10 Gbps directly to networks such as Internet2 & GEANT2. More details are
available at http://www.kaust.edu.sa/