June 4, 2012 — June 8, 2012 (Udine, Italy @ CISM)
http://www.cism.it/courses/C1202/
Multiscale mechanics of hierarchical materials plays a crucial role
in understanding and engineering biological and bioinspired materials
and systems. The mechanical properties of engineering materials have
been studied extensively, and changed our world by enabling the design
of complex structures and advanced devices. The mechanical science of
hierarchical tissues and cells in biological systems has recently
emerged as an exciting area of research and provides enormous
opportunities for innovative basic research and technological
advancement. Such advances could enable us to provide engineered
materials and structures with properties that resemble those of
biological systems, in particular the ability to self-assemble, to
self-repair, to adapt and evolve, and to provide multiple functions that
can be controlled through external cues.
However, despite significant advancements in the study of biological
materials in the past decade, the fundamental physics of many phenomena
in biology continue to pose substantial challenges with respect to model
building, experimental studies, and simulation. Specifically, the
understanding of the mechanisms of failure in biological systems remains
a major issue, in particular in the context of breakdown of tissue in
disease states, the failure of biological components due to injuries,
and the ability of biological systems to mitigate adverse effects of
damage through self-healing mechanisms. Because of our lacking ability
to engineer biological materials, we also remain hindered in our ability
to mass produce and utilize these materials for daily life
applications, through consumer products, medical devices and large-scale
systems in aerospace, defense and building technologies. The
hierarchical bottom-up design approach in biology, from the level of
genes (DNA), to proteins, to tissues, organs and organisms, originates
at the molecular scale and requires a bottom-up description from a
fundamental perspective. For this reason, approaches rooted in physics
that consider the structure-process-property paradigm of materials
science are a powerful means to investigate the properties of biological
materials, a new field of study referred to as materiomics.
The aim of this course is to present lectures from leading
researchers in the field of mechanical sciences of biological materials
and structures, with a focus on the behavior of biological materials
under extreme physical, chemical as well as physiological conditions and
human disease, as well as on biomimetic and bioinspired material
development for technological applications. To provide a thorough
foundation for this research, the course will focus on the integration
of advanced experimental, computational and theoretical methods applied
to the study of biological materials, across disparate length- and
time-scales, from nano to macro. A particular focus of this course will
be the discussion of theoretical, computational and experimental tools
utilized to assess structure-process-property relations and to monitor
and predict mechanisms associated with the function and failure of
biological materials and structures composed of them. The lectures will
provide an overview over emerging fields in this broad field of
research and outline important challenges and opportunities.
Invited Lecturers
- Roberto Ballarini*
(University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA) - Performance indices of biological structures, fracture mechanics of and
experiments on biological structures and materials at the nano, micro
and macro scales. - Andreas Bausch
(Technische Universität Muenchen, Germany) - Experimental methods in biological molecules and materials. Single
molecule mechanics: Theory and Experiment. Cytoskeletal proteins:
Physics of semiflexible polymers. Viscoelasticity of actin networks:
Linear response/nonlinear response. Viscoelasticity of actin networks:
linear response. - Markus Buehler*
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA) - Multiscale science of protein materials in extreme conditions and
disease; molecular modeling and simulation, multi-scale modeling,
bionanomechanics. Introduction to materiomics. - Chwee Teck Lim
(National University of Singapore, Singapore) - Introductory cell mechanics and mechanobiology. Experimental techniques
in cell & molecular mechanics. Biomechanics approaches to studying
human diseases. - Alberto Redaelli
(Politecnico di Milano, Italy) - Biomechanics of tissues (blood vessels, blood flow, etc.), multi-scale modeling of microtubules, tissue engineering.
- Joachim Spatz
(Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart Germany) - Introduction to experimental cell biology. Cell-materials interactions:
Introduction and case studies. Nanoscience at the interface to biology. - *Coordinators, please contact in case you have any questions.
