megan, vina, anna, claire - the nonsymmetric one
who said that girls can't build towers??? this girls only team added an extra challenge by making their truss structure nonsymmetric. it was 1.4 spaghettis lengths high and one of the most beautiful buildings of the day! weighing was a challenge though due to its width! congrats to this great team!

more photos: spaghetti towers 01, spaghetti towers 02

the mathematics of growth & remodeling of soft biological tissues

miniworkshop
mathematisches forschungsinstitut oberwolfach
08/31/08-09/06/08, oberwolfach, germany
ellen kuhl, davide ambrosi, krishna garikipati

abstract biology is becoming the most attractive field of application of mathematics. the discoveries that have characterized the biological sciences in the last decades have become the most fertile matter for application of classical mathematical methods, while they offer a natural environment where new theoretical questions arise. mathematical biology' has born many years ago and has developped along directions that now constitute its traditional background: population dynamics and reaction-diffusion equations. nowadays mathematical biology is differentiating into several branches, essentially depending on the specific spatial scale size under consideration: molecular scale (i.e. dna transcription, protein folding and cascades), cellular scale (i.e. motility, aggregation and moprhogenesis) and macroscale (i.e. tissue mechanics). currently one of the most attractive scientific topics is the mathematics of growth and remodelling of soft biological tissues. this area, located at the crossroads of biology, mathematics and continuum mechanics, concerns the statement and analysis of the equations that characterize the mechanics, growth and remodelling of systems like arteries, tumors and ligaments, studied at the macroscopic scale. these are open continuous systems that pose new challenging questions, which go beyond the standard mechanics that is traditionally devoted to closed systems. past initiatives in oberwolfach have been devoted to the interaction between biology and mathematics in a broad sense. a minisymposium in oberwolfach focusing on the mathematics of growth and remodelling of soft biological tissues' would be the occasion to bring together established researchers on this topic with newer entrants to the field.

multiscale modeling of materials

minisymposium
9th usnccm
07/23/07-07/26/07, san francisco, usa
ellen kuhl, ekkehard ramm

abstract multiscale modeling of materials has advanced to a research topic of growing interested in the past decades. This trend is driven by the desire to characterize the material behavior, in particular in the context of material failure, as accurately as possible by looking at the characteristic substructure of the material on smaller scales. a typical example are granular media which can be described through phenomenological continuum theories on the macroscopic level while discrete particle interaction theories provide further insight in their complex failure phenomena on the microscopic level. bridging the gap between the different scales is one of the most challenging problems in multiscale modeling. from a computational point of view, this task can be accomplished in two different ways: the individual scales can either be coupled horizontally or vertically. In the former approach, which could be thought of as a kind of model adaptivity, the material characterization is refined in regions of particular interest, e.g. in potential failure zones, while the remaining part of the structure is still modeled on the phenomenological level. the vertical coupling approach is maybe more common in material modeling. while continuum-based strategies like the finite element method can be applied to simulate the material behavior on the macroscopic scale, discrete element techniques, particle methods or dislocation dynamics are typically applied to characterize the material response on the microscopic scale. the vertical coupling thus essentially aims at defining appropriate analytical or numerical homogenization techniques to carry discrete microscopic information up to the macroscopic phenomenological level. within this mini-symposium, we encourage abstracts related to the following key issues: micromechanically motivated constitutive models, higher order continuum theories, discrete element simulations of different failure phenomena, enhanced finite element techniques to simulate overall structural failure, multifield aspects of material failure, model adaptivity, computational homogenization techniques, and experimental validation and parameter identification.

computational methods in biological growth and remodeling

minisymposium
9th usnccm
07/23/07-07/26/07, san francisco, usa
ellen kuhl, krishna garikipati

abstract this symposium will focus on theoretical and computational methods for mass and volumetric change (growth) and microstructural changes (remodeling) in biomechanical problems. over the past two decades, a number of theoretical approaches have been laid down to explain functional adaptation of biological tissues. Included among them are the classical theory of adaptive elasticity, open system thermodynamics, reaction diffusion in porous media, mixture theories and different theories of microstructural evolution. within this minisymposium, we would like to turn the focus somewhat to the challenges related to the computational realization of these theories, while still recognizing the need for continued theoretical development. with these aims in mind, we invite abstracts addressing (but not necessarily restricted to) the following topics of relevance to biological growth and remodeling: further development of growth and remodeling theories, algorithms for multifield phenomena of mechanics, transport and reaction, appropriate formulation and time discretization of biological rate equations, computational treatment of scale interaction in space and time,

the role of computational homogenization techniques, and relaxation methods in microstructural evolution.