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
8.50 Coffee
Chair: Robert McMeeking
9.00 – 9.10: Welcome
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
10.30 - 11.00 Coffee
Chair: Thomas Pardoen
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
12.30 - 13.50 Lunch at Pembroke College
Chair: TJ Lu
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
15.20 - 15.50 Coffee
Chair: Pedro Ponte
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: Coffee
Chair: Davide Bigoni
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!
10.30 - 11.00 Coffee
Chair: Martin Idiart
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
12.30 - 13.50 Lunch at Pembroke College
Chair: Frank Zok
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
15.20 - 15.50 Coffee
Chair: Erik van der Giessen
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
17.15 – 17.35 Mike Ashby, Cambridge University
TEN FACES - the people behind the papers
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
9.30 – 9.40: Coffee
Chair: Magnus Langseth
9.40 – 10.20 Kostas Danas, Ecole Polytechnique
Magnetorheological elastomers: what we know and what we don't
10.20 - 11.00 Horacio Espinosa, Northwestern University
In situ micro and nanomechanical characterization of materials
11.00 - 11.30 Coffee
Chair: Vikram Deshpande
11.30- 12.10 Odd Hopperstad, NTNU
Challenges in Brittle and Ductile Fracture: Impact of Flaws, Defects, and Material Heterogeneity
12.10 - 12.20 Final remarks and discussion
12.30 - 14.00 Lunch at Pembroke College
End