Travel Grant: 10th International Conference on Multiscale Materials Modeling; Baltimore, Maryland; October 19-22, 2020

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This grant provides travel support for the 10th International Conference on Multiscale Materials Modeling, which will be held at the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore, Maryland, on October 19-22, 2020. The conference will be jointly hosted by George Mason University, Georgetown University, and the University of Maryland. Multiscale materials modeling (MMM) is a branch of computational mechanics, computational biomechanics, and computational materials science in which existing and emerging methods from interdisciplinary fields are combined to bridge phenomena, which are inherent to complex material systems, across different length and time scales. MMM provides direct insights on how materials (or living matter) deform and/or adapt their form and function in response to different mechanical, electrical, magnetic, or environmental exciters, and trace this to material structure and molecular (or cellular) level mechanisms. MMM is also indispensable for expediting the development and manufacturing of reliable materials with superior performance by moving away from empirical trial-and-error techniques, to state-of-the-art and experimentally verified multi-scale computational methods. This grant will help to considerably subsidize travel costs, through scholarships, for 50 graduate students and 25 junior researchers, with emphasis on under-representative groups, to participate, showcase their work, as well as interact with leaders in the MMM community who regularly attend this conference. These travel fellowships will also help promote/highlight NSF-funded research focused on MMM. This four-day conference brings together researchers from academia, national laboratories, and industry from across the globe with interdisciplinary research backgrounds in mechanics, biomechanics and mechanobiology, materials, advanced manufacturing, and computational mechanics and sciences to share new advancements in the field and identify existing and future challenges. Each day there will be an hour-long plenary session, two 45 minutes semi-plenary sessions, and 5.5 hours of 9 to 13 parallel technical sessions. Each technical session will be composed of multiple 20 minutes contributed presentations and 30 minutes invited presentations. There will also be two separate evening poster sessions in which a student poster competition will be held. The outcome of this conference will be disseminated in the form of several peer reviewed journal special issues that would feature several conference articles. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.