Markus J. Buehler, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, is one of 83 young engineers invited by the National Academy of Engineering to attend its 2007 Frontiers of Engineering meeting.
The annual two-day event brings together outstanding engineers aged 30-45 from industry, academia and government to discuss pioneering research in different engineering fields. Each year's program is designed to provide these top-notch engineers with an opportunity to learn about cutting-edge developments in fields other than their own, so that they may begin collaborative work and establish cross-disciplinary and cross-sector contacts with their peers early in their careers.
Matthew J. Lang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and biological engineering at MIT, will be one of the 16 speakers at the event.
"Frontiers of Engineering is a proven mechanism for traversing engineering disciplines," said NAE President Wm. A. Wulf. "By exposing bright young minds to developments in areas other than their own -- and giving them lots of time to interact -- Frontiers enables advances in approaches and thinking that would not have occurred otherwise."
This year's Frontiers will be held at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., Sept. 24-26. Attendees will discuss topics as diverse as how to engineer trustworthy computer systems, develop safe water technologies, and model and simulate human behavior; the current state of biotechnology for fuels and chemicals; and how to control protein conformations.
Buehler's research group seeks to understanding how materials behave under extreme conditions, for example, when they break, disintegrate or yield, in order to gain insight into how materials are made. The ultimate goal would be to enable the synthesis of new materials. The group develops and uses large-scale, massively parallelized modeling techniques, which include differential multi-scale simulation methods that allow description of material behavior across scales ranging from the atomistic to the continuum engineering scale. At the same time, the techniques also model the chemistry during the formation and breaking of molecular bonds.
