Norman Fleck Celebration Symposium
Sunday 31st August 2025
18.00 – 20.00: Drinks and light snacks reception at Pembroke College
Monday 1st September 2025
Lecture Room 4 Engineering Department, Trumpington Street, CB2 1PZ
9.00 – 9.10: Start and Coffee
9.10 – 9.50 Huajian Gao, Tsinghua University
Mechano-X: Endless Frontier of Mechanics in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Research and Innovation
9.50 – 10.30 Xuanhe Zhao, MIT
Mechanics for merging humans and machines
Coffee
11.00 - 11.40 John Biggins, Cambridge University
Bringing solids to life
11.40- 12.20 Antonio de Simone, SISSA
Bio-inspired active materials and systems for sustainable engineering design
Lunch at Pembroke College
14.00 – 14.40 Dennis Kochmann, ETH
Machine learning in mechanics: what it’s good for (and what it isn’t)
14.40 – 15.20 Matt Begley, UCSB
High throughput mechanics simulations to accelerate materials and process design
Coffee
15.50 – 16.30 Carlos Portela, MIT
High-throughput experimentation across scales
16.30 – 17.10 Clare Grey, Cambridge University
Developing new tools to understand how batteries function and fail: Connecting transport with degradation processes
Tuesday 2nd September 2025
Lecture Room 4 Engineering Department, Trumpington Street, CB2 1PZ
9.00 – 9.10: Start and Coffee
9.10 – 9.50 Marc Geers, Eindhoven University of Technology
Advances in the micromechanics of metal plasticity
9.50 – 10.30 Patrick Onck, University of Groningen
Micromechanics is alive!
Coffee
11.00 - 11.40 Pilar Ariza, Universidad de Sevilla
Bridging time scales in atomic-level transport phenomena
11.40- 12.20 Tobias Kraus, INM
Predicting nanoparticlce spacings
Lunch at Pembroke College
14.00 – 14.40 Renee Zhao, Stanford University
Functional Structural Instability
14.40 – 15.20 Changqing Chen, Tsinghua University
Static topological mechanics: from space-time duality to localized deformations
Coffee
15.50 – 16.30 Ole Sigmund, DTU
Some outstanding problems in metamaterial design
16.30 – 17.10 Claus Pedersen, Dassault Systèmes
Leveraging Academia Mechanics and Optimisation Research into Industrial Developments
19.00 – 22.00: Banquet in the main dining hall of Pembroke College
Wednesday 3rd September 2025
Lecture Room 4 Engineering Department, Trumpington Street, CB2 1PZ
9.00 – 9.10: Start and Coffee
9.10 – 9.50 Zhigang Suo, Harvard University
Fatigue-Resistant Polymers
9.50 – 10.30 Kostas Danas, Ecole Polytechnique
Magnetorheological elastomers: what we know and what we don't
Coffee
11.00 - 11.40 Horacio Espinosa, Northwestern University
In situ micro and nanomechanical characterization of materials
11.40- 12.20 Odd Hopperstad, NTNU
Challenges in Brittle and Ductile Fracture: Impact of Flaws, Defects, and Material Heterogeneity
Lunch at Pembroke College
End