Ying Li, University of Connecticut

George Lykotrafitis, University of Connecticut

Zhangli Peng, Notre Dame University

Mechanics plays a very significant role in biological systems. For instance, cells actively sense and respond to their environment via signaling. Applied forces, geometry, elasticity, and chemistry of the extracellular matrix are important in several biological processes and pathologies. However, the complexity of biological systems sets up a major hurdle for the understanding of their behavior. Moreover, multiple spatial and temporal scales are typically involved due to the hierarchical structures and nested processes in biological systems. All these issues bring unprecedented challenges and also great opportunities to experimental, theoretical, and computational studies of molecular, cellular, and tissue mechanics. These challenges call for close collaborations between scientists from different disciplines including engineering, physics, biology, chemistry, and materials science. The overarching goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers with a variety of backgrounds to exchange ideas, to team up for addressing grand challenging problems, or to initiate new areas of research. We propose three major themes under this symposium: Tissue Mechanics: Constitutive modeling of biological tissues, experimental measurement of tissue properties, tissue remodeling, structure-function relations of tissues, numerical simulations in tissue mechanics, biological and disease applications of tissue mechanics, biomechanics of cartilage and arteries.Cellular and subcellular Mechanics: Cell adhesion, cell motility, mechanical properties of single cells, constitutive and computational modeling of cells, single-cell mechanical testing, cell membrane mechanics, cell cytoskeleton, cell-extracellular matrix interactions, mechanotransduction in cells, morphogenesis, intracellular mechanics, multi-cellular structure formation and organization, cellular uptake of nanoparticles, mechanics of actin cortex and intermediate filament networks, mechanics of nucleus, mechanics of motile and immotile cilia, mechanics of microtubules.Molecular Mechanics: Deformation of DNA, RNA and proteins, analytic and computational analysis of biomolecules, mechanisms of mechanosensing and mechanotransduction, cell adhesion molecules, mechanics of subcellular structures and organelles, mechanics of endocytosis, viral budding, viral packaging, self-assembly of nanoparticles mediated by organic molecules, mechanosensitive channels.

keywords:  human health, biomechanics