News

• The United States--Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) is sponsoring a 4 year collaborative research to investigate the interaction of soft materials with magnetic fields under finite elastic deformations. The key point is that the mechanical properties of the materials can be changed rapidly and substantially by externally applied magnetic fields. Thus, the coupling between mechanics and electromagnetism is both strong and highly nonlinear. Principal investigators are Gal deBotton from Ben Gurion University in Israel, Pedro Ponte Castaneda from the University of Pennsylvania and Luis Dorfmann from Tufts.
   
• In May of 2009 the National Science Foundation has awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grants to Huai-Ti Lin, a PhD student in the Department of Biology. The topic of Huai-Ti's sponsored research is the Mechanics of Soft-Bodied Legged Locomotion using the tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta) caterpillar as the model system. Congratulations for a job well done!
   
• Professor Luis Dorfmann will be presenting ongoing project work at the 7th EUROMECH Solid Mechanics Conference (ESMC2009), September 7-11, 2009, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal. Jointly with Ray Ogden, he will be hosting a Mini-Symposium entitled "Nonlinear effects in magneto- and electro-active materials." Topics range through theoretical foundations, modeling, computational methods and experimental techniques.
   
• The acquisition of biaxial testing equipment in the MSML was made possible through a Keck Foundation grant, which was awarded to seven Tufts faculty in the Schools of Engineering and Arts and Sciences for developing "Biomimetic Technologies for Soft Bodied Robots". Also posted on New York Times and Science Daily.
   
• The International Centre for Mechanical Sciences (CISM) in Italy offers a short course on Electrodynamics of Magneto- and Electro-Elastic Materials from June 29th-July 3rd 2009. Lectures are given by Ray Ogden, University of Glasgow; David Steigmann, University of California at Berkeley; Gérard Maugin, Université Pierre et Marie Curie/CNRS; Paul Steinmann, University of Erlangen; Antonio DeSimone, SISSA, Trieste and Luis Dorfmann, Tufts University. Lecture notes will be published by Springer.
  
  
  
   
• The acquisition of Instron Corporation BioPuls™ Submersible Pneumatic Grips and Temperature-Controlled Bath for use in the MSML was made possible through additional Tissue Engineering Resource Center (TERC) funding, sponsored by the NIH. See our funding page.