News and Events

The November, 2006, edition of the journal Science features a special section devoted to composites. The XFEM in particular is discussed in the article "In Quest of Virtual Tests for Structural Composites" by Brian Cox and Qingda Yang. The XFEM enables researchers to examine in detail all types of failures in composites with complex structures.

The Robert J. Melosh Medal Competition is a graduate student paper competition in computational mechanics. It was inaugurated in 1989 to honor Professor Melosh, a pioneering researcher in finite element methods and former chairman of civil and environmental engineering. This year, the Melosh Symposium will be held on Friday, April 27, 2007 at ETH Zurich. The six finalists for the competition have been announced and are listed here.

Dr. Youngjean Jung, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, has accepted an offer from the DCML for the Fall of 2006. Youngjean's Ph.D. is in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley. He has expertise in nonlinear solid mechanics and level set methods.

The 7th World Congress in Computational Mechanics was hosted at the Westin Century Plaza Hotel & Spa, Los Angeles on July 16-22, 2006. The congress gathered researches from around the world to discuss the state-of-the-art in computational solid and fluid mechanics. Several members of the Duke Computational Mechanics Laboratory attended and/or delivered talks at the Congress.

Dr. Ilinca Stanciulescu, a postdoctoral fellow and former graduate student in the Duke Computational Mechanics Laboratory, will join the faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the Fall of 2006. The program at UIUC is the top-ranked CEE program in the country. We wish Ilinca all the best in her new position.