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. 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 seven honorary doctoral degrees.

Gerhard A. Holzapfel - Graz University of Technology, Austria and Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

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 is listed in "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014" (Thomas Reuters), he received the Erwin Schrödinger Prize 2011 from the Austrian Academy of Sciences for his lifetime achievements, was awarded 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 was elected an International Member of the United States National Academy of Engineering in 2025. In 2024 he received a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

Robert M. McMeeking - UC Santa Barbara, USA

Born in Scotland, Robert M. McMeeking received his Ph.D. at Brown University in 1977, under the supervision of Professor James R. Rice. He worked at Stanford University for two years and at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign on the faculty of the Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Department for seven years. He joined the University of California Santa Barbara in 1985, where he currently holds the Tony Evans Distinguished Professorship of Structural Materials and of Mechanical Engineering. He is the author of several highly cited papers in the field of theoretical and computational mechanics, with applications to cell mechanics, microstructural evolution, ferroelectric systems, actuating and shape morphing structures. Among several awards and honors, he became member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2005 and received the Timoshenko Medal in 2014 and the Prager Medal in 2015.

Invited Speakers

The list of invited speakers is constantly updated.

Marta Alloisio - KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Philip S.L. Anderson - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

Stéphane Avril - Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France

Benny Bar On - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Alice Berardo - University of Padua, Italy

Szabolcs Berezvai - Budapest University of Techology and Economics, Hungary

Michele Ciavarella - Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy

Matteo Ciccotti - ESPCI Paris, France

Chelsea Davis - University of Delaware, USA

Eric Euchler - Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research, Germany

Behrooz Fereidoonnezhad - Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

Wei Hong - Southern University of Science and Technology, China

K. Jimmy Hsia - Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Shelby Hutchens - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

Kaare H. Jensen - Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

Santanu Kundu - Mississippi State University, USA

Christian Linder - Stanford University, USA

Edoardo Mazza - ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Miguel Angel Moreno-Mateos - FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

Paola Nardinocchi - Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Aisling Ní Annaidh - University College Dublin, Ireland

Rahul Panat - Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Andrea Spagnoli - University of Parma, Italy