Minisymposium on "Soft Materials and Structures", 50th SES Meeting at Brown University (July 28-31, 2013).

This is a friendly reminder to draw your attention to the Symposium on **Soft Materials and Structures** to take place at the upcoming 50th Meeting of the Society of Engineering Sciences (SES) at Brown University, Providence, RI (July 28-31, 2013). More information can be found in the meeting's website: http://www.brown.edu/Conference/ses2013/

Over the past few years, soft materials and soft mechanical structures have driven our community into new exciting directions. Large deformations and instabilities of soft materials/structures can be immensely rich, albeit nontrivial. As a result, they offer unique opportunities to design multifunctional materials and devices with novel properties, through the appropriate design of the structural layout. The mini-symposium will address recent experimental, computational and theoretical advances in this direction. Topics of particular interest include:

• Electroactive and magnetoactive elastomers;
• Liquid crystal elastomers;
• Shape-memory and light-sensitive polymers;
• Responsive gels and Ionic Polymer-Metal Composites (IPMC);
• Soft structures including rods, plates, shells and biological structures;
• Geometric and material instabilities;
• Foldable and deployable structures.

The deadline for receipt of abstracts is Monday, April 1, 2013. Abstracts can be submitted using the following link:
http://www.brown.edu/Conference/ses2013/abstract_submission.htm
Please select Soft Materials and Structures as the primary subject area under the track of Mechanics of Solids and Structures to ensure allocation to the correct session.

Pedro Reis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
preis@mit.edu 6173243325

Xuanhe Zhao, Duke University
xz69@duke.edu

Katia Bertoldi, Harvard University
bertoldi@seas.harvard.edu

Oscar Lopez-Pamies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
pamies@illinois.edu