Speakers
Keynote Speakers
Zdeněk P. Bažant - Northwestern University, USA
Born and educated in Prague (Ph.D. 1963), Zdeněk P. Bažant joined Northwestern University in 1969, where he holds the Walter P. Murphy Professorship since 1990 and the McCormick Institute Professorship since 2002 in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is the author of various books dealing with stability of structures, fracture and size effect, inelastic analysis, and of several highly cited publications, ranking worldwide no. 1 in civil engineering and no. 2 in engineering across all fields in 2019 (in Stanford weighted citation survey). He is a member of several academies, including the US National Academy of Sciences, US National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Italian National Academy dei Lincei. Among his awards and honors, he received the Prager Medal in 1996, the von Karman Medal in 2005, the Timoshenko Medal in 2009, the ASME Medal in 2017, and he holds nine honorary doctoral degrees.
Gerhard A. Holzapfel - Graz University of Technology, Austria
Gerhard A. Holzapfel is Professor of Biomechanics and Head of the Institute of Biomechanics at Graz University of Technology (TUG), Austria, since 2007. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, and Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Until 2013 he was Professor of Biomechanics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. After his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in Graz he was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (1993-95), with Juan Simo. Among several awards and honors in the past years he received the Erwin Schrödinger Prize 2011 from the Austrian Academy of Sciences for his lifetime achievements, the 2021 William Prager Medal and the 2021 Warner T. Koiter Medal. He received an Honoris Causa Doctorate from the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, France, in 2024 and an Honorary Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Parma, Italy, in 2025. In 2025, he received the Huiskes Medal for Biomechanics from the European Society of Biomechanics and the EUROMECH Solid Mechanics Prize. He was elected a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences: Engineering Division in 2024 and an International Member of the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2025. In 2024, he received a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).
K. Jimmy Hsia - Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
K. Jimmy Hsia is President Chair Professor in Mechanical Engineering in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. He received his B.S. degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, his M.S. degree from Beijing University of Aeronautics, China, and his Ph.D. from MIT, USA. His research focuses in the area of applied mechanics including, but not limited to, material failure and fracture, soft materials and soft robotics, micro- and nanoscale mechanical behavior of materials and micro-nano-technologies, mechanics of living cells and biological systems, biomedical device development and applications. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in top journals and has co-authored 2 books published by Springer. He has been elected Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and Fellow of American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He was recipient of US National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Initiation Award, Max-Planck Society Scholarship, and Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship. He is Founding co-Editor-in-Chief of Extreme Mechanics Letters.
Invited Speakers
Riccardo Alberini - ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Marta Alloisio - KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Philip Anderson - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
Mattia Bacca - The University of British Columbia, Canada
Benny Bar-On - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Chandler Benjamin - Texas A&M University, USA
Alice Berardo - University of Padua, Italy
Szabolcs Berezvai - Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
Michele Ciavarella - Politecnico di Bari, Italy
Matteo Ciccotti - ESPCI Paris, France
Tal Cohen - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Franz Dammaß - TU Dresden, Germany
Chelsea Davis - University of Delaware, USA
Eric Euchler - Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden, Germany
Behrooz Fereidoonnezhad - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Alessio Gizzi - Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Italy
Julius Heinrich - Anton Paar Germany GmbH, Germany
Wei Hong - Southern University of Science and Technology, China
Shelby Hutchens - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
Kaare H. Jensen - Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
John Martin Kolinski - École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
Attila Kossa - Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
Santanu Kundu - Mississippi State University, USA
David Labonte - Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Miguel Angel Moreno-Mateos - FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Krishnaswamy Ravi-Chandar - The University of Texas at Austin, USA
Andrea Spagnoli - University of Parma, Italy
Michele Terzano - Graz University of Technology, Austria