Biomechanics is the study of the structure, function and motion of the mechanical aspects of biological systems, at any level from whole organisms to organs, cells and cell organelles, using the methods of mechanics. Biomechanics is a branch of biophysics.
Engineering physics, or engineering science, refers to the study of the combined disciplines of physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, particularly computer, nuclear, electrical, electronic, aerospace, materials or mechanical engineering. By focusing on the scientific method as a rigorous basis, it seeks ways to apply, design, and develop new solutions in engineering.
Michael Levitt, is a South African-born biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems". In 2018, Levitt was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science.
Computational mechanics is the discipline concerned with the use of computational methods to study phenomena governed by the principles of mechanics. Before the emergence of computational science as a "third way" besides theoretical and experimental sciences, computational mechanics was widely considered to be a sub-discipline of applied mechanics. It is now considered to be a sub-discipline within computational science.
Computational Engineering is an emerging discipline that deals with the development and application of computational models for engineering, known as Computational Engineering Models or CEM. Computational engineering uses computers to solve engineering design problems important to a variety of industries. At this time, various different approaches are summarized under the term Computational Engineering, including using computational geometry and virtual design for engineering tasks, often coupled with a simulation-driven approach In Computational Engineering, algorithms solve mathematical and logical models that describe engineering challenges, sometimes coupled with some aspect of AI, specifically Reinforcement Learning.
Biomechanical engineering, also considered a subfield of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, combines principles of physics, biology, and engineering. Topics of interest in this field include biomechanics, computational mechanics, continuum mechanics, bioinstrumentation, design of implants and prostheses, etc. This is a highly multidisciplinary field, and engineers with such a background may enter related niche careers, e.g., as an ergonomics consultant, rehabilitation engineer, biomechanics researcher, and biomedical device engineer.
Joel Henry Ferziger was a Professor Emeritus of mechanical engineering at the Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, United States. Ferziger was an internationally recognized authority in fluid mechanics. His main area of research was computational fluid dynamics. He was known for developing computer simulations to model complex turbulent flows.
Dimitris Drikakis, PhD, FRAeS, CEng, is a Greek-British applied scientist, engineer and university professor. His research is multidisciplinary. It covers fluid dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, acoustics, heat transfer, computational science from molecular to macro scale, materials, machine learning, and emerging technologies. He has applied his research to diverse fields such as Aerospace & Defence, Biomedical, and Energy and Environment Sectors. He received The William Penney Fellowship Award by the Atomic Weapons Establishment to recognise his contributions to compressible fluid dynamics. He was also the winner of NEF's Innovator of the Year Award by the UK's Institute of Innovation and Knowledge Exchange for a new generation carbon capture nanotechnology that uses carbon nanotubes for filtering out carbon dioxide and other gases.
George Em Karniadakis is a professor of applied mathematics at Brown University. He is a Greek-American researcher who is known for his wide-spectrum work on high-dimensional stochastic modeling and multiscale simulations of physical and biological systems, and is a pioneer of spectral/hp-element methods for fluids in complex geometries, general polynomial chaos for uncertainty quantification, and the Sturm-Liouville theory for partial differential equations and fractional calculus.
Emily Ann Carter is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. She has been on the faculty at Princeton since 2004, including as serving as Princeton's Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2016 to 2019. She moved to UCLA to serve as executive vice chancellor and provost and a distinguished professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, before returning to Princeton in December 2021. Carter is a theorist and computational scientist whose work combines quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, and applied mathematics.
Leonid Berlyand is a Soviet and American mathematician, a professor of Penn State University. He is known for his works on homogenization, Ginzburg–Landau theory, mathematical modeling of active matter and mathematical foundations of deep learning.
Gerhard Alfred Holzapfel is an Austrian scientist, (bio)mechanician. He is currently a professor of Biomechanics and Head of the Institute of Biomechanics at Graz University of Technology, Austria, since 2007. He is also the International Chair of Biomechanics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and a visiting professor at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow, Scotland. He was a professor of biomechanics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, for 9 years until 2013. He is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the international scientific journal Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology by Springer Nature since the first issue published in June 2002.
Nadia Lapusta is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. She designed the first computational model that could accurately and efficiently simulate sequence of earthquakes and interseismic slow deformation on a planar fault in a single consistent physical framework.
Alain Goriely is a Belgian mathematician, currently holding the statutory professorship (chair) of mathematical modelling at the University of Oxford, Mathematical Institute. He is director of the Oxford Centre for Industrial Mathematics (OCIAM), of the International Brain and Mechanics Lab (IBMTL) and Professorial Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford. At the Mathematical Institute, he was the director of external relations and public engagement, from 2013 until 2022, initiating the Oxford Mathematics series of public lectures. In 2022, he was elected to the Royal Society.
Rajat Mittal is a computational fluid dynamicist and a professor of mechanical engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a secondary appointment in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is known for his work on immersed boundary methods (IBMs) and applications of these methods to the study of fluid flow problems.
Ellen Marie Arruda is an American mechanical engineer known for her research on the mechanical properties of polymers and on tissue engineering, with applications including the design of improved football helmets, artificial tooth enamel that can withstand high-shock and high-vibration environments, and nanolayered composite materials that are lightweight, as strong as steel, and transparent. The Arruda–Boyce model for the behavior of rubber-like polymers is named for her and her doctoral advisor Mary Cunningham Boyce, with whom she published it in 1993. She is Maria Comninou Collegiate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Tim Manganello / Borg Warner Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan.
Ellen Kathryn Longmire is an American applied physicist and mechanical engineer known for her research in experimental fluid dynamics and turbulence. She is a professor of aerospace engineering and mechanics at the University of Minnesota, where she is also Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Science & Engineering,, the former chair of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics, and one of three editors-in-chief of the journal Experiments in Fluids.
Eleni Chatzi is a Greek civil engineer, researcher, and an associate professor and Chair of Structural Mechanics and Monitoring at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Mitra J.Z. Hartmann is a professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering at the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University. She specializes in robotics, sensory acquisition behaviors, sensorimotor integration, and neuroethology. Her lab focuses on translating sensory signals felt by whiskers to robotics.
Gregory M. Odegard is a materials researcher and academic. He is the John O. Hallquist Endowed Chair in Computational Mechanics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering – Engineering Mechanics at Michigan Technological University and the director of the NASA Institute for Ultra-Strong Composites by Computational Design.
