All lectures are in Lecture Room 6,

Department of Engineering, Trumpington Street, CB2 1PZ

 

Poster session is in Lecture Room 4,

Department of Engineering, Trumpington Street, CB2 1PZ

 

All Lunches are in The Old Library,

Pembroke College, Trumpington Street, CB2 1RF

 

Sunday 19 April 2026 (Day 0)

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18.00 – 21.00     Drinks and buffet dinner at Old Library, Pembroke College, Trumpington Street, CB2 1RF

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Monday 20 April 2026

(Day 1: Engineering Dept., rooms LR5 & LR6)

 

8.30 – 8.50           Coffee in LR5

 

8.50 – 9.00           Welcome & Introduction

 

9.00 – 9.30           Bob McMeeking, UCSB, USA
An overview of the interaction of chemistry and solid mechanics

 

9.30 – 10.00        Alberto Salvadori, Brescia, Italy

New avenues in the Chemo-Mechanics of bio-polymer networks

 

10.00 – 10.30      Alan Needleman, Texas A&M, USA

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, Non-negative Dissipation Rate and Continuum Formulations for Discrete Events

 

10.30 – 11.00       Coffee break in LR5

 

11.00 – 11.30        Dick Broer, Eindhoven, Netherlands

Director steered surface dynamics at liquid crystal polymer surfaces

 

11.30 – 12.00       John Biggins, Cambridge, UK

Reshaping Liquid Crystal Elastomers with Light             

 

12.00 – 12.30       Yanlei Yu, Fudan, China

All-optical microfluidic technology enabled by photodeformable liquid crystal polymers

 

12.40 – 13.50       Lunch in Old Library, Pembroke College

 

14.00 – 14.30      Javier LLorca, IMDEA, Spain

Phase field modelling of corrosion and mechanical degradation of Mg implants for biomedical applications

 

14.30 – 15.00      Emilio Martinez-Paneda, Oxford, UK

Chemo-mechanics of hydrogen embrittlement: state-of-the-art and challenges ahead

 

15.00 – 15.30      Ananya Renuka Balakrishna, UCSB, USA

A lattice-continuum link in intercalation compounds

 

15.30 – 16.00      Coffee break in LR5

 

16.00 – 16.30      Pedro Reis, EPFL, Switzerland

Gyrophilia: Waltzing with Instabilities to Morph Rotating Structures

 

16.30 – 17.00       Giovanni Noselli, SISSA, Italy

Non-reciprocity in soft active structures            

 

18.30 – 21.30       Pub Dinner: Drinks & dinner at Pint Shop, 10 Peas Hill, Cambridge, CB2 3PN

 

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Tuesday 21 April 2026

(Day 2:  Engineering Dept., rooms LR4, LR5 & LR6)

 

8.50 – 9.00          Coffee in LR5

 

9.00 – 9.30          Andrew Stuart, Caltech, USA

Microscopic Statistics from Macroscopic Response   

 

9.30 – 10.00        Miguel Bessa, Brown, USA

Variance estimation Bayesian Neural Networks (VeBNNs): Cooperative training for uncertainty disentanglement and robust materials design     

 

10.00 – 10.30      Burigede Liu, Cambridge, UK

Title to be announced

 

10.30 – 11.00       Coffee break in LR5

 

11.00 – 11.30       Douglas Holmes, Boston, USA

Mechanical Metamaterials and Unconventional Computing

 

11.30 – 12.00       Matthew Juniper, Cambridge, UK

Bayesian Inference, Adjoint Methods, and Flow-MRI: using physics to extract maximum information from noisy sparse flow data

 

12.00 – 12.30       Vikram Deshpande, Cambridge, UK

Neural rendering enables high speed tomography

 

12.40 – 13.50       Lunch in Old Library, Pembroke College

 

14.00 – 15.00      Poster session in LR4

 

15.15 – 15.45        Xuanhe Zhao, MIT, USA

Mechanics for Merging Humans and Machines: Mechanobiology and Mechanomedicine

 

15.45 – 16.15        Eoin McEvoy, Galway, Ireland

Active cell-based models enhanced by neural networks to study cancer growth and remodelling

 

16.15 – 16.30       Coffee in LR5

 

16.30 – 17.00      Taher Saif, UIUC, USA

Mechanics link to brain health.

 

17.00 – 17.30       Anna Pandolfi, Milano, Italy     

Modelling the multiphysics of the human eye

 

  

19.00 – 22.30      Drinks and Conference dinner at Old Library, Pembroke College, Trumpington Street, CB2 1RF

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Wednesday 22 April 2026

(Day 3, Engineering Dept., rooms LR5 & LR6)

 

8.50 – 9.00          Coffee in LR5

 

9.00 – 9.30          Daniel Needleman, Harvard, USA

Active Mechanics of Human Mitotic Spindles

 

9.30 – 10.00        Luca Giomi, Leiden, Netherlands

Mechanics of axis formation in Hydra

 

10.00 – 10.30      Marino Arroyo, UPC, Spain

Reshaping of cellular sheets

 

10.30 – 11.00       Coffee break with Poster session in LR5

 

11.00 – 11.30       Emmanuel Seifert, Grenoble, France

Metabeams with programmable nonlinear bending response.

 

11.30 – 12.00       Diego Misseroni, Trento, Italy

Programmable Mechanics in Origami Metamaterials

 

12.00 – 12.30       Antonio De Simone, SISSA, Italy

Spontaneous oscillations in biological and bio-inspired systems

 

12.40 – 14.00      Lunch in Old Library, Pembroke College

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​Conference ends after lunch Wednesday at 14:00

 

 

 

Posters for session on Tuesday 21 April 2026 @14.00 in LR4

 

Pradeep Kumar Bal, UPC, Spain
Continuum theory for the active mechanics of curved epithelial shells

 

Arnaud Vadeboncoeur, Cambridge, UK

Microscopic Statistics From Macroscopic Response: A Learning Framework

 

Roberto Marchello and Pietro Maria Santucci, SISSA, Italy

Flutter in non-Euclidean active shells: Theory and Experiments

 

Xiaoyu Zhang, Fudan, China

Light-steerable peristaltic wave in a liquid crystal polymer film

 

Yu Pu, Fudan, China

All-optical Microfluidic Technology Enabled by Photodeformable Linear Liquid Crystal Polymers

 

Uba Kanthasamy Ubamanyu, EPFL, Switzerland

Stochastic size effect on the buckling of cylinders with discrete local dimples

 

Ammar Ahmed Khan, Cambridge, UK

Optically reconfiguring the shape of Liquid Crystal Elastomers

 

Mattia Serpelloni and Paolo Tesini, Brescia, Italy

Multi-physics Modeling and HPC Simulations of Protein Relocation in Advecting Cells

 

Mario Ibrahim, EPFL, Switzerland

Fluidizing granular chute flows

 

Arash Imani, UPC, Spain

Modeling Biochemical Signaling in Actomyosin Dynamics

 

Sasa Kovacevic, Oxford, UK

Phase field modelling of corrosion and biocorrosion

 

Javier Lorente-Macías, Cambridge, UK

Adjoint-based inverse modelling and optimal control in acoustic microfluidics: Applications to inkjet printing

 

Michał Zmyślony, Cambridge, UK

Snapping and switching of active arches with patterned preferred curvature

and Vector Slicer – 3D printing of shape morphing sheets

 

Santosh Kumar Raut, IISc, India

Biaxial stretching of cells induces stress fiber growth and increased tractions

 

Mirac Onur Bozkurt, Cambridge, UK

Deformation-induced crystallographic domains in silicone rubber

 

Zahra Hooshmand-Ahoor, Cambridge, UK

4D In-situ Characterisation of Time-Dependent Deformation Mechanisms in Carbon Fibre Composites

 

Hao Yin and Ben Amir, Cambridge, UK

Combined local stress and strain measurements enable machine learning of constitutive models