There will be a mini-symposium entitled "Defects and Microstructure at the Nanoscale and Beyond," at the USNCCM-10 conference in Columbus, OH, July 16 -19, 2009.  This topic is of keen interest to the I-Mechanica community and we hope many of you will join us there. Our goal is to bring together researchers from the mechanics, materials, and physics communities to cross-fertilize research on defect-mediated processes in microstructural evolution, with a focus on both hard and soft materials.