Plenary Lectures

General Lecturer

Bernhard A. Schrefler holds a PhD and DSc from the Swansea University, Wales, is Professor Emeritus of the University of Padua, Senior Affiliate Scientist of the Houston Methodist Research Institute, Hans Fischer Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Munich and honorary fellow of the University of Swansea. He has been awarded the Maurice Biot, Euler, Gauss-Newton and O.C. Zienkiewics Medals, and honorary doctorates from the St. Petersburg State Technical University, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Universities of Lodz and Hanover, and the Ecole Normale Superieure, Cachan.

Plenary Lecturers

Katia Bertoldi is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Harvard John A.Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She earned master degrees from Trento University (Italy) in 2002 and from Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) in 2003, majoring in Structural Engineering Mechanics. Upon earning a Ph.D. degree in Mechanics of Materials and Structures from Trento University, in 2006, Katia joined as a PostDoc the group of Mary Boyce at MIT. In 2008 she moved to the University of Twente (the Netherlands) where she was an Assistant Professor in the faculty of Engineering Technology. In January 2010 Katia joined the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and established a group studying the mechanics of materials and structures. She is the recipient of the NSF Career Award 2011 and of the ASME's 2014 Hughes Young Investigator Award. She serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Extreme Mechanics Letters. She published over 120 peer-reviewed papers and several patents. For a complete list of publication and research information: http://bertoldi.seas.harvard.edu/

Dr Bertoldi’s research contributes to the design of materials with a carefully designed meso-structure that leads to novel effective behavior at the macroscale. She investigates both mechanical and acoustic properties of such structured materials, with a particular focus on harnessing instabilities and strong geometric non-linearities to generate new modes of functionality. Since the properties of the designed architected materials are primarily governed by the geometry of the structure (as opposed to constitutive ingredients at the material level), the principles she discovers are universal and can be applied to systems over a wide range of length scales.

Odd Sture Hopperstad is Professor in Structural Engineering at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He received his PhD degree in 1993 from NTNU. His main research interests are mechanics of materials, damage mechanics and impact mechanics with special emphasis on plasticity and fracture of aluminium alloys. Since 2010 he is Associate Editor in European Journal of Mechanics -A/Solids.

Ray Ogden graduated in Mathematics from Cambridge University, from where he also gained his PhD.  He has held academic appointments in the UK at the universities of East Anglia, Bath, Brunel and Aberdeen, and has been George Sinclair Professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow since 1984. 
He has received several prestigious awards, including most recently the IUTAM/Elsevier Rodney Hill Prize in Solid Mechanics (2016) and the ASME Timoshenko Medal (2016).  He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.  His research includes fundamental aspects of the theory of nonlinear elasticity and applications to, for example, rubber elasticity, fibre-reinforced materials, biomechanics of soft tissues, electroelasticity, magnetoelasticity and acoustoelasticity. 
His work has been published in more than 250 papers in international journals, and several books, including the ‘Non-linear Elastic Deformations’, and ‘Nonlinear Electroelastic and Magnetoelastic Interactions’.  He has done considerable service as a journal editor for the IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics, the International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics and several other journals, and has held visiting appointments for various periods in Austria, Australia, Canada, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, USA.

Zhigang Suo is Allen E. and Marilyn M. Puckett Professor of Mechanics and Materials at Harvard University. 
He earned a bachelor degree from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 1985, and a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1989.  
Suo joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1989, Princeton University in 1997, and Harvard University in 2003.  
His research centers on the mechanics of materials and structures. Basic processes include fracture, deformation, polarization, and diffusion, in response to various stimuli (e.g., mechanical forces, temperature, electric field, chemical potential, sound and light). Applications are concerned with microelectronics, sensors and actuators, wearable or implantable electronics, soft robots and soft machines, energy harvesting and storage.  Suo co-founded iMechanica.org, and is a founding co-editor-in-chief of Extreme Mechanics Letters. 
He was a member of the Executive Committee (2005-2010, Chair 2010) of the Applied Mechanics Division, of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.  Suo received the Humboldt Research Award, the Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal, the Special Achievement Award for Young Investigators in Applied Mechanics, the Robert Henry Thurston Lecture Award, and the Prager Medal.  
He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.