STRUCTURES KEYNOTE
Dr. Stewart Silling
Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff
Sandia National Laboratories
Multiscale Dynamic Material Modeling Department
Biography: Dr. Silling is currently a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received S.B. degrees from MIT in Physics and Nuclear Engineering (1977) M.Eng. from UC Berkeley in Nuclear Engineering (1981) and a Ph.D. from Caltech in Applied Mechanics (1986).
His experience includes:
- Staff member at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
- Engineer at Science Applications International Corp (SAIC)
- Assistant Professor at Brown University
- Visiting faculty member at Caltech
- Visiting Scholar at The Boeing Company
His current areas of research interest include solid mechanics, computational methods, and fractured fragmentation. He is the recipient of Belytschko Medal (2015) awarded by United Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM).
STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS KEYNOTE
Sondipon Adhikari, PhD
Professor of Engineering Mechanics
James Watt School of Engineering
The University of Glasgow
Biography: Professor Adhikari holds the position of Professor of Engineering Mechanics at the James Watt School of Engineering of the University of Glasgow. He received his PhD in 2001 as a Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Trust scholar at the Trinity College from the University of Cambridge. In 2010 he Received the Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society (UK academy of sciences). He was an Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) Advanced Research Fellow (2004-09) and winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2007) in Engineering (given to an outstanding scholar under the age of 35).
Professor Adhikari did his BEng and MSc from The University of Calcutta (now Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur) and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1995 and 1997 respectively. He was the holder of the inaugural Chair of Aerospace Engineering at the College of Engineering of Swansea University (from April 2007 - September 2021). Before that, he was a lecturer at Bristol University (January 2003 - March 2007) and a Junior Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (2001-03). Since 2015 he has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He was a visiting professor at Carleton University (Canada, 2006) and a visiting scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA, 2006). In 2008 he was an official visitor to the Cambridge University Engineering Department and a visiting Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Between 2016 to 2019, he was a visiting Professor at the University of Paris East (France), The University of Texas at Austin (USA), Rice University (USA), Ecole Centrale de Lyon (France), IIT Kanpur (India), and The Central South University in Changsha (China).
MATERIALS KEYNOTE
Cate Brinson, Ph.D.
Duke University
Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science
Biography: Cate Brinson is the Sharon and Harold Yoh Professor and Donald Alstadt Department Chair of the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department at Duke University. She obtained her phd from Caltech and was faculty at Northwestern University prior to joining Duke. She is an expert in the broad area of mechanics of materials, with emphasis on complex hierarchical materials and polymer based systems, and merging concepts of data science into materials. Experimental and computational work spans the range of molecular interactions, micromechanics and macroscale behavior. Current research foci include nanostructured polymers, interfacial behavior, structural metamaterials and AI and data platforms for material query and design. Her awards include the Eringen Medal of SES, the Nadai Medal of ASME, the Bessel Prize of the Humboldt Foundation and a Fellow of many professional societies. She served on the SES Board of Directors and is a founding member of the Materials Research Data Alliance (MaRDA).