A vacant four-years PhD position is available. This PhD project will be done in Erasmus Medical Center (Rotterdam, NL) in collaboration with Delft University of Technology (Delft, NL) and is a part of a larger Dutch project on regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. The aim of the project is to generate cartilage from bone marrow derived stem cells in culture and evaluate them with molecular assays (Rotterdam) and mechanical assays (Delft). The culture protocol can be varied with oxygen level, tonicity, and active molecules.

Call for Abstracts (Deadline extended to February 12, 2011)

 As a part of WCCM 2012 (10th World Congress on Computational Mechanics)

 Submit Your Abstract (Choose mini-symposium MS-149)

I have a one-year vacant postdoc position. The work will be mostly related to development of FE models for modeling growth, differentiation, and adaptation of biological tissues. The postdoc needs to know a lot about nonlinear continuum mechanics and advanced material models and should be able to write FE codes and implement advanced material models in commercial FE programs.

There is a strong collaboration between my research group in Delft University of Technology (TUDelft) and Prof. Harrie Weinans’ research group in Erasmus Medical Center (Rotterdam). Most experimental works on tissues will be done in collaboration with them.

Deadline for submission of abstracts extended to January 18th.

Modeling the constitutive behavior of biological tissues often involves anisotropy, hyperelasticity, viscoelasticity, and poroelasticity. I am looking for a good monograph/paper/textbook that presents a general constitutive modeling framework where these aspects are presented in an interconnected way. Most references treat these aspects separately, perhaps devoting a chapter to every aspect. My preferred way of treatment starts with presentation of hyperelasticity and then extending it to visco-hyperelasticity by modification of the strain energy function and perhaps separation (decoupling) of the terms describing the hyperelastic part and the viscous part.

 Call for Abstracts (Deadline: November 30, 2011)

 As a part of WCCM 2012 (10th World Congress on Computational Mechanics)

 Submit Your Abstract (Choose mini-symposium MS-149)

Call for Abstracts (Deadline: December 15, 2011)

As a part of ECCOMAS 2012 (European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering)

Submit your Abstract (Choose mini-symposium MS114)

The first issue of the new interdisciplinary Nature journal (Nature Communications) is avilable online. Here is the description of the journal from the website of the journal:

Nature Communications is an
online-only, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing
high-quality research in all areas of the biological, physical and
chemical sciences. Papers published by the journal represent important
advances of significance to specialists within each field.

The recent issue of Nature Materials includes a review paper on the deformation and failure of protein materials in physiologically extreme conditions and disease. The paper was interesting, so I am posting the abstract here. For the full-paper visit Nature Materials.

Nature Materials 8, 175 - 188 (2009) | doi:10.1038/nmat2387

Deformation and failure of protein materials in physiologically extreme conditions and disease

Markus J. Buehler & Yu Ching Yung

A very recent paper published a few minutes ago in Nature addresses the issue of friction laws at the nanoscale. Here is the abstract of the paper.Interested? here you can download the paper.

I have noticed that a lot of people are using UMAT and VUMAT material model
subroutines for their researches. However, most of these subroutines do not
find their way to free code market and remain in the hands of the developers.
Therefore, a lot of wheel re-inventing has to be done by other people. Since
development and testing of a material subroutine takes a damn long time, I
think it is a good idea if each of us can share the subroutines she has
developed with the others. I know that a couple of subroutines are publicly
available and many other people also know that. Please comment about less-known
freely available subroutines.