mechanicians

It is my pleasure to solicit nominations for the "Eshelby Mechanics Award for Young Faculty". This award, launched in 2012, is given annually to rapidly emerging junior faculty who exemplify the creative use and development of mechanics. The intent of the award is to promote the field of mechanics, especially among young researchers. While interdisciplinary work that bridges mechanics with physics, chemistry, biology and other disciplines is encouraged, the ideal awardee will demonstrate clear inspiration from mechanics in his/her research.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the outcome of the inaugural competition for the Eshelby Mechanics Award for Young Faculty. This award, created in 2012, will be annually given to rapidly emerging junior faculty who exemplify the creative use and development of mechanics. The intent of the award is to promote the field of mechanics, especially among young researchers. The selection committee consisted of: K. Ravi-chandar (UT Austin), Huajian Gao (Brown University), Kaushik Bhattacharya (Caltech), Roger Fosdick (Minnesota University), and Yonggang Huang (Northwestern University).

This year the Applied Mechanics Division, through the generosity the Haythornthwaite Foundation, presented a new divisional award, the Haythornthwaite Research Initiation Grant.  This new grant targets university faculty that are at the beginning of their academic careers engaged in research in theoretical and applied mechanics.  This year there were three recipients of the 2011 awards.

Christian Franck, Brown University

I like to keep the mindset of being a student, learning from all sources on all topics I am interested. Recently I have learned quite a lot about mechanics and mechanicians from Applied Mechanics News and its sister blogs and now iMechanica.

With a job as an assistant professor, I always try to motivate my students to become future mechanicians. For this reason, I started Modeling Place as a group blog in January and gently forced my students to participate. Out of the five students I have, two actively participate by posting frequently, two occasionally post, and one dropped out quickly after one post. Together, the blog has been doing reasonably well, in terms of both quantity and quality of posts.

I learned a few tricks in handling images and got to know some interesting works in the general area of mechanics. How about the students? What benefits have they received? I have to ask them. For one, I awarded one student with a little gift as the best post of the semester. More importantly, I believe that they are reading more than they used to do, thus gaining broader knowledge and interest in mechanics and related science. They not only read the posts in the blog but also read from other sources (online or not) to find something to post. Furthermore, they have a place to practice writing. It is a big step from reading to writing, not only for foreign students I think.

It may be still too soon to tell how well this works, but the students themselves should be able to tell us more. If you are a student, I encourage you to comment on this to tell the professors what you like or don't like about iMechanica. At this stage of development, much more features and benefits can be accomodated. Your ideas could shape the future of iMechanica and benefit all students and those considering themselves as students of life.