BIO of Elias Aifantis

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Elias C. Aifantis graduated with a Diploma from National Technical University of Athens in 1973 and with a PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1975. He became an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign in 1976, a visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota in 1980 and a full Professor at the Michigan Technological University in 1982. Currently he is an Emeritus Professor of Mechanics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki/Greece and Michigan Technological University/USA, as well as Mercator fellow at Friedrich-Alexander University/Germany and a Distinguished Professor at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture/China. Formerly, he has also been a Distinguished Faculty Advisor at King Abdulaziz University/Saudi Arabia, Distinguished Visiting Expert at ITMO University/Russia and Southwest Jiaotong University/China, as well as MegaGrant Director at Togliatti State University/Russia. He has promoted highly interdisciplinary work in mechanics of materials by bringing into the field of solid mechanics ideas from diffusion theory, chemical reactions, and nonlinear physics. He has coined the terms dislocation patterning, material instabilities, gradient plasticity/elasticity, chemo/nanomechanics, and pioneered internal length gradient (ILG) theories in these fields. Currently, he is extending the ILG framework to revisit electromagnetism and Maxwell’s equations, as well as gravitation and Newton’s Law. He has published over 339 articles and received about 12,609 citations with 55 h-index (Scopus); 11,730 citations with 54 h-index (Web of Science); 17,860 citations with 66 h-index (Google Scholar). He is included in the ISI Web of knowledge list of the world’s most highly cited authors in engineering.

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BIO of Douglas Bammann

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I spent 26 and a half years at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA where I retired at a level designated as "Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff" immediately before beginning at MSU in the fall of 2007.
During my 29 years work experience at the national labs, university and industry, I was able to manage and secure external funding up to $104.75 million (projected in 2009-11). Some of my funding agencies include National Science of Foundation (NSF), US Department of Energy (DOE), US Department of Transportation (DOT), Oak Ridge National Lab, US Department of Defense, and US TACOM.
I have been involved in the application of these types of material models to manufacturing processes such as forging, forming welding, heat treatment and distortion and in particular the importance of accurate physically based modeling in predicting the material evolution during a multi-stage series of manufacturing processes of these types. My interests also include the utilization of differential geometry in the description of crystal defects to develop generalized continuum models capable of describing processes at the micro and nano level. My first major assignment was to develop and implement a temperature and strain rate dependent plasticity model to predict material state and failure in the B83 energy mitigating nose cone. This analysis was the first large scale three dimensional finite element simulation and appeared on the cover of �Discover Magazine� and the cover of John Zukas �Impact Dynamics� book. This was also the birth of �the Bammann Plasticity Model� that later became �the Bammann-Chiesa-Johnson (BCJ) Plasticity/Damage Model� that is the core foundation of research at the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) at Mississippi State University (MSU).
I organized four major international symposiums on various topics related to metals and polymers at Sandia National Labs. I also organized symposia and was chair/co-chair as part of more than 100 international conferences. I have been reviewer for more than 15 international journals and I am on editorial board of prestigious journal the Archive of Mechanics. Apart from this, I have given numerous invited lectures at various universities, national labs, and industries. At the later part of my career at Sandia, I was invited to give the plenary lecture at the 2005 combined meeting of the ASME, ASCE and SES. In 2008, I was bestowed with the honor of a Fellow of the ASME and am currently nominated to become a Fellow of the American Academic of Mechanics.
I have taught graduate courses in �Continuum Mechanics�, graduate courses in �Inelasticity�, and developed and taught a graduate level course in �Advanced Inelasticity�, which I will teach again in Spring of 2010. I continue to advise undergraduate (1), graduates (2 MS, and 4 PhD), post-doc fellows (2), and research professors (4) in various projects. I have been interacting with various other research faculties, post-doc fellows, and PhD. Graduate students at CAVS. Also, I have had the privilege of continued consulting with Sandia National Lab.
In the year 2000, I led a team that won the prestigious R&D 100 research award on microstructure based modeling of manufacturing processes.
RESEARCH EXPERTISE:
Coupled physics theoretical modeling, finite deformation inelasticity, damage evolution, fracture, penetration, and impact; numerical modeling of nano- and microstructural mechanics; finite element analyses of manufacturing methods such as forming, forging, and other metal processing methods; crashworthiness, and high-rate deformation.
EDUCATION:
PhD 1981 University of Illinois, Urbana, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
MS 1977 University of Illinois, Urbana, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
BS 1973 Illinois State University Normal, Physics
EMPLOYMENT/TEACHING EXPERIENCE:
2007-present Professor � Mechanical Engineering, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS
1981-2007 Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, (Continuum Mechanics, Plasticity and Failure of Metals), Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore, CA
2002-2003 Sabbatical at Georgia Tech � Taught Course on Advance Thermodynamics of Inelastic Deformation
1989-present Instructor and Course Director for National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI). Course Director Duties Include Organization Training (Including Principles of Modern Educational Philosophies) of Instructors for NAUI
1979-1980 Directed and Coordinated 10 Sections of Dynamics at UIUC
1976-1980 Taught 11 Courses in Statics and Dynamics at UIUC
1974-1975 Caterpillar Tractor Company, Mossville, IL
Worked in Vehicle Tests and Evaluation on Fatigue of Large Structures
HONORS/AWARDS:
SES Fellow - 2013
ASME Fellow - 2008
J. O. Smith Award for outstanding Teaching Assistant (1980)
R&D 100 Award (2000) for microstructure property model
SOCIETIES:
American Society of Mechanical Engineers � member since
2007-present Chair � Applied Mechanics Division and Materials Division Joint Committee on Constitutive Equations at ASME
Society of Engineering Science

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BIO of John Baumgardner

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John Baumgardner is research professor emeritus in the School of Engineering at Liberty University. He completed a Ph.D. in geophysics and space physics from UCLA in 1983. He served in a computational fluid mechanics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory using some of largest high performance computing systems in the world during most of his subsequent scientific career. The breadth of Dr. Baumgardner’s computational expertise includes geophysics, nuclear materials, ocean and weather modeling, and biology. Since the mid-1980’s he has contributed most of the primary research on the concept of catastrophic plate tectonics that can result from the observed stress-weakening rheology of mantle minerals. More recently he was part of a team which identified multiple lines of radioisotope evidence that nuclear decay rates have varied significantly during earth history. After his retirement from Los Alamos he helped develop the code known as Mendel’s Accountant that has been applied to study the genetic history of life.

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BIO of Mark Horstemeyer

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Prof. Mark Horstemeyer was educated at Georgia Tech, one of the oldest Engineering Universities in the United States (1888), while working up the ranks as a Manager of the Fluid/Thermal Modeling Department in Sandia National Labs, helping form and expand its already prominent worldwide stance in Engineering Research, Nuclear Science and National Security. Horstemeyer held a Chair position for the Center of Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) at Mississippi State University (MSU), was a Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MSU, a Honorary Professor in Xihua University, China and was the Founder and President of several engineering industry companies before becoming the Dean of Engineering at Liberty University, VA in 2019. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Society of Metals, the Society of Automotive Engineers and a member of most of the prominent societies of the Engineering community including the American Academy of Mechanics, the Materials Research Society, and TMS societies, among others.

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BIO of Nathaniel Morgan

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Dr. Morgan earned a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona in 2000 and received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2005. During his graduate studies, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as a student intern in the Engineering Sciences and Applications division and then in the Theoretical division. He joined LANL as a staff member in 2005 and has work there for over 15 years on applying and developing novel methods and models to simulate dynamic material experiments. He is an adjunct professor at Mississippi State University in the mechanical engineering department, and an author or coauthor on more than 45 publications.
Dr. Morgan’s research interests encompass applied mathematics, computer science, solid dynamics, and modeling and simulation. He developed revolutionary numerical methods suitable for simulating compressible material dynamics with strong shocks, contact discontinuities, multiple materials and phases present within an element, and materials that have nonlinear constitutive relationships. He developed level set methods for simulating flows with phase transformation on unstructured arbitrary element meshes. His research has yielded a range of Eulerian, Lagrangian, and Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) methods for simulating real-world engineering applications on unstructured meshes.
Dr. Morgan is a technical leader at LANL charged with creating next-generation compressible material dynamics codes that are based on modern numerical methods such as the high-order Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin method, and that are coupled to advanced material models including crystal plasticity models. These new codes are designed for performance portability over diverse types of massively parallel computer architectures including upcoming exascale machines built with heterogeneous processors (e.g., GPUs). The objective of the project is to enable routine, three-dimensional, high-fidelity simulations of large-scale dynamic experiments.

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BIO of Raj Prabhu

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Dr. Raj Prabhu is an Associate Director for the Computational Engineering Mechanics thrust at the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems and an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Mississippi State University. Dr. Prabhu earned his doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering from Mississippi State University, and he earned his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, Chennai, India. He also holds an Honorary Research position in the College of Engineering at Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK. He has extensively published in the research areas of biomaterials informatics, multiscale modeling and experimentation of the brain, specifically to investigate the mechanical and structural evolutions of the brain due to primary injuries arising from external mechanical insults. He also conducts research in computational mechanics, biomaterial informatics, and bio-inspired design. In his present position, he leads a team of several faculty, research engineers, post-doctoral research associates, graduate and undergraduate students to conduct research in integrated computational materials engineering, vehicular lightweighting, and human-centric design.

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BIO of Arunachalam Rajendran

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Arunachalam M. “Raj” Rajendran serves as Chair and professor for the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), Oxford, MS. Prior to joining the University of Mississippi, Dr. Rajendran served the U.S. Army Research Office as Chief Scientist for the Engineering Sciences Directorate in 2000-2008. At Ole Miss, he has received the School of Engineering 2012 Outstanding Teaching Award, 2016 Outstanding Faculty Award, and 2017 University’s Graduate School Exceptional Graduate Advising and Mentoring Award.
Dr. Rajendran has served in the Advisory Board Portfolio Review Panel for the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) / ISS U.S. National Laboratory (2015-2018) and in U.S. Corp oF engineers Laboratory’s basic research review panel (2011-2018). He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1994), Fellow of the Society of Engineering Science (2012), Distinguished Fellow of ICCES, and Emeritus Fellow of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (2000). He is the receiver of the ICCES’s Eric Reissner Medal (2007), and Life Time Achievement award (2011). Dr. Rajendran has published over 150 articles, and edited 10 books, and chaired over 50 international conferences and symposiums. He has given invited/keynote talks at over 100 universities and symposiums throughout the world. Dr. Rajendran obtained his PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, WA in 1981.

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BIO of Kyle Johnson

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Dr. Kyle Johnson is a Senior Member of Technical Staff in the Materials and Failure Modeling Department at Sandia National Laboratories. Prior to joining Sandia, Dr. Johnson received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Mississippi State University. His research focuses on predicting the behavior and failure of materials. In particular, much of Dr. Johnson’s recent research has involved process and performance modeling to predict residual stresses and mechanical behavior of additively manufactured metallic structures. In addition to AM, Dr. Johnson’s research interests include ICME, material constitutive modeling, solid mechanics, and design optimization.

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BIO of J. Brian Jordon

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Dr. J. Brian Jordon, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Alabama. His research interests include, fatigue and fracture, constitutive modeling, process-structure-property-performance relationships, welding and joining, and solid-state additive manufacturing. Dr. Jordon has recently published a book on Fatigue of Friction Stir Welding, and in addition has authored over 100 journal articles and conference proceedings. His research has been supported by the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the State of Alabama, and various private industries. Professionally, Dr. Jordon has organized numerous symposia and chaired committees at international conferences such as the annual ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE) and The Minerals, Metals, & Materials Society (TMS) meetings. In 2014, Dr. Jordon was a recipient of the TMS Young Professional Development award, and in 2017 he was a finalist for The University of Alabama President’s Faculty Research Award. He currently serves on the editorial board of Materials and Manufacturing Processes journal. Prior to coming to The University of Alabama, Dr. Jordon was an Interim Associate Director and an Assistant Research Professor at the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems at Mississippi State University.

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BIO of Avraam Konstantinidis

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Avraam A. Konstantinidis received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering in 1996 as well as his PhD in 2000 (with Prof. E.C. Aifantis as his advisor), respectively, from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh). In 2003 he joined the General Department of AUTh, as a Lecturer and later as an Assistant Professor, and he is currently an Associate Professor of the Civil Engineering Department of AUTh and also acts as the Director of the Laboratory of Engineering Mechanics of AUTh (http://etem.civil.auth.gr/en/). His research interests involve non-local modeling of material behavior at various scales (macro-, micro- and nano-scale), multiscale simulations, experiments for material characterization at the micro- and nano-scale, as well as snow avalanches/landslides modeling. He has published over 40 journals, as well as 15 proceedings articles, and his work has received ~280 citations and an h-index of 10 (SCOPUS).

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