A postdoctoral position is available starting immediately in the Johnson Research Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The position will involve theoretical and computational modeling of the mechanics of soft materials/flexible electronics/adhesion, with applications in photonics and energy storage.  The work will involve significant interactions with experimental groups in the Department of Materials Science at the University of Illinois.  Applicants should send a CV with a list of references to htj [at]

At the invitation of Yonggang Huang, I’ll give 4-hour lectures at the NSF Summer Institute Course on the Mechanics of Soft Materials.   I attach the slides of the lectures, to be given on Monday, 10 May 2010.  An abstract of the lectures follows.

I welcome and encourage all my fellow imechanicians to participate in the international conference being organised at Thapar university patiala,  punjab, india during november 2010.

The details regarding the conference and research paper format are attached.

for further queries log on to www.thapar.edu, or http://www.thapar.edu/news-eventDet.asp?id=97 or email at

I am inspired by Mike Ciavarella's recent post on the Shape of the Eiffel Tower to share a bit of my own obsession with the Tower...

I am trying to model a simple 2-D consolidation test in Abaqus.  I am essentially applying a distributed line load across the top of a square soil mesh.  The excess pore pressures that are generated are plotting as negatives.  Is this the expected sign convention for a 2-phase soil/water mesh in compression?

Job Title:Computational Geomechanics Job Summary:ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company has an immediate opening in Computational Mechanics for research scientist at our Corporate Strategic Research Laboratory. Our lab focuses on fundamental science that can lead to technologies having a direct impact on the oil and gas industry.

I saw this on Science Daily, anyone knows ?

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100329135101.htm

A fully funded PhD position is immediately available in the area of multi-scale modeling of geomaterials within the research project "Failure of cohesive geomaterials: bridging the scales - GEOBRIDGE" at Laboratoire Sols, Solides, Structures - Risques (3S-R), Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France.

Hello All. This is my first blog entry in iMechanica!. This post is about my new paper with Prof. Amine Benzerga entitled "A constitutive model for plastically anisotropic solids with non-spherical voids", accepted for publication in JMPS (URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmps.2010.03.007 ). In case you are not able to view the online version, a preprint of the paper is attached. This paper should be of interest to anyone working in the ductile fracture area. Your comments and feedback are welcome.