Program > Plenary lectures

Irene Arias

Irene Arias received a B.S. and M.S in Civil Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University on a Fulbright/BSCH fellowship. She has been Professor of Civil Engineering at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya since 2004. She received the Fellows Award of the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IAMC) in 2020. She was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2015 and was distinguished with an ICREA Academia Award in 2016. Her research focuses on the development of mathematical and computational models for electromechanics in complex materials at small scales. She is interested in exploring the effects of gradients on the physics of dielectrics and ferroelectrics, identifying fundamental manifestations and extracting the underlying engineering principles for a new generation of energy metamaterials.

Laurence Brassart

Laurence Brassart is an Associate Professor in the Solid Mechanics & Materials Group of the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. She received her diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Louvain in 2007, followed by a PhD in Engineering Sciences from the same university in 2011. She then successively held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University (BAEF Fellowship) and the University of Louvain (FNRS Fellowship). From 2015 to 2019, she was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Monash University, Australia. Prof Brassart is the recipient of a prestigious Future Leaders Fellowship from UKRI (2022). She is an associate editor of the Journal of Theoretical, Computational and Applied Mechanics (JTCAM), a recently established journal committed to the principles of Open Access and Open Science. She also serves on the advisory boards of International Journal of Plasticity and International Journal of Solids and Structures. Prof Brassart’s research focuses on the development of micromechanical and constitutive modelling approaches for engineering materials, including polymers, composites, soft materials, and energy materials, with emphasis on multiphysics aspects.

Gerard Holzapfel

Gerhard A. Holzapfel is Professor of Biomechanics and Head of the Institute of Biomechanics at Graz University of Technology (TUG), Austria, since 2007. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, and Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. After his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in Graz he received an Erwin-Schrödinger Scholarship for foreign countries to be a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (1993-95). Dr. Holzapfel has authored a graduate textbook entitled "Nonlinear Solid Mechanics. A Continuum Approach for Engineering", and co-edited seven books. He contributed chapters to 25+ other books, and published about 300 peer-reviewed journal articles. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the International Journal "Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology" (Springer). Among several awards and honors in the past years he is listed in "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014" (Thomas Reuters), he received the Erwin Schrödinger Prize 2011 from the Austrian Academy of Sciences for his lifetime achievements, and he was awarded the 2021 William Prager Medal and the 2021 Warner T. Koiter Medal.

Erica Lilleodden

Prof. Dr. Erica Lilleodden is the Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Microstructure of Materials and Systems IMWS since February 2022. In her research work she is primarily concerned with the nano- and micromechanics of materials and correlations to microstructural characteristics. This serves to deepen an understanding of the application behavior of such materials and contributes to the tailor-made development of materials and multi-scale material systems with specific properties for high-performance applications. Following her studies in materials science at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities and her Ph.D. at Stanford University, her professional career has included positions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and at the Helmholtz Center hereon. From 2014 to 2022, she was Professor at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) and is since 2023 Professor at the Martin Luther University in Halle. She is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, the Board of Trustees of the Karl Heinz Beckurts Foundation and of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Leibniz-IWT. She was awarded the DGM Prize in 2019 and in 2023 was elected to acatech, the National Academy of Science and Engineering.

Pedro Reis

Pedro Miguel Reis is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He received a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Manchester, UK (1999), a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Mathematics (Part III Maths) from St. John’s College and DAMTP, University of Cambridge (2000), and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Manchester (2004). He was a postdoc at the City College of New York (2004-2005) and at the CNRS/ESPCI in Paris (2005-2007). He joined MIT in 2007 as an Instructor in Applied Mathematics. In 2010, he moved to MIT’s School of Engineering, with dual appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering, first as the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor and, since the summer of 2014, as Gilbert W. Winslow Associate Professor. In October 2013, the Popular Science magazine named Prof. Reis to its 2013 “Brilliant 10” list of young stars in Science and Technology. In 2021, he was the President of the Society of Engineering Science. Prof. Reis has also received the 2014 CAREER Award (NSF), the 2016 Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award (Applied Mechanics Division of the ASME), the 2016 GSOFT Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research (APS), and he is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Stéphane Roux

Stéphane Roux graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique in 1983 and the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC) in 1985. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the ENPC in 1990. As a CNRS Research Professor, he served successively at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI), at the joint CNRS/Saint-Gobain Research Laboratory, and currently, he is at the Laboratory of Mechanics Paris-Saclay at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay. His research activity is devoted to data processing and image-based measurements for experimental mechanics. This includes digital image correlation, stereo-correlation (for surface reconstructions in 3D), and also digital volume correlation for tomography. He holds 17 patents and is the author of more than 410 publications. He received the Silver Medal from the CNRS in 2006, and the Jaffé prize (French Academy of Sciences) in 2019.