James R. Rice is Mallinckrodt Professor of Engineering Sciences and Geophysics at Harvard University, appointed jointly in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Rice was previously on the faculty of Brown University (1965-1981) and was educated in mechanics at Lehigh University (1958-1964). His focus in recent years is on mechanics and fracture theory directed to earth and environmental problems, including fault zone processes, earthquake nucleation, dynamic rupture propagation, tsunami generation, meltwater interactions with glacier dynamics, landslide processes, and general hydrologic phenomena involving fluid interactions in deformation, flow and failure of earth materials. His earlier work focused more on inelastic deformation and fracture in mechanical and materials engineering, including elastic-plastic crack propagation in ductile metals, path-independent integral methodology, microscopic mechanisms of deformation and failure, deformation localization into shear zones, and finite-element and spectral numerical methodology in solid mechanics. See
http://esag.harvard.edu/rice/RiceCV.html, and
http://esag.harvard.edu/rice/RicePubs.html.

　John Hutchinson received his undergraduate education in engineering mechanics at Lehigh University and his graduate education at Harvard University. He is currently the Abbott and James Lawrence Research Professor of Engineering at Harvard. Hutchinson and his collaborators work on problems in solid mechanics concerned with engineering materials and structures. Examples of ongoing research activities are: (1) Efforts to extend plasticity theory to small scales, (2) Development of a mechanics framework for assessing the durability of thermal barrier coatings for gas turbine engines, (3) Micro-mechanics and computation mechanics of ductile fracture, and (4) Mechanics of delamination and fracture of thin films, coatings and multilayers.

　Huajian Gao received his B.S. degree from Xian Jiaotong University of China in 1982, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Science from Harvard University in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He served on the faculty of Stanford University between 1988 and 2002, where he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 1994 and to Full Professor in 2000. He served as a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research between 2001 and 2006 before joining the Faculty of Brown University in 2006. At present, he is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Engineering at Brown.
Professor Gao’s research is focused on the understanding of basic principles that control mechanical properties and behaviors of materials in both engineering and biology. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering of USA and a co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, the flagship journal of his field. He is also the recipient of numerous academic honors, from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995 to recent honors including the Alexander von Humboldt Prize from Germany and Rodney Hill Prize in Solid Mechanics from the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in 2012.

　Professor Bhushan L. Karihaloo holds a chair at Cardiff University. Previously he has held chairs in Australia and Denmark. His research interests cover a broad spectrum of materials from nano to macro scales and fracture mechanics. He has published more than 400 papers in journals and conference proceedings. He was awarded the Griffith Medal by the European Structural Integrity Society in 2006 and DSc (honoris causa) by St Petersburg University, Russia in 2007. He is an honorary fellow of the Czech Society of Mechanics and of ICF.
Professor Karihaloo is a Member of Editorial Board of 9 International Journals and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Fracture. He was a Vice-President of the International Conference on Fracture (1997 – 2001, 2005 – 2009), the Chair of The Royal Society UK National Panel of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) (2004 – 2008), and a Member of Congress Committee of IUTAM (1994 – 96, 2000 – 2008).

　Professor Wei Yang was born on February 16, 1954 in Beijing, China. He graduated from Northwestern Polytechnic University in 1976, and received his MS degree from Tsinghua University in 1981 and Ph.D. degree from Brown University, USA in 1985. He is a Member of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS).
From May 1978 to August 2004 he worked as a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Mechanics of Tsinghua University. He served as the Head of the Department of Engineering Mechanics from 1997 to 2004. From 2004 to 2006, he chaired the Academic Committee of Tsinghua University. From September 2004 to July 2006, he served as Director of the Office of Academic Degrees Committee under State Council of China and Head of the Division of Degree Management and Graduate Education in Ministry of Education of China. Since August 2006, he has been serving as the President of Zhejiang University. He was elected as the Interim Chair of Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) in 2009.
He is the President of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
Prof. Yang has made important achievements in fracture mechanics, meso and nano mechanics. He is a Bureau member of IUTAM.

　Academician (corr.) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), PhD, D.Sci. in Mathematics and Physics, Professor
Graduated from Saint-Petersburg State University in 1980
1995 – Professor of the St.-Petersburg State University
1999 – Director of the Research Centre of Dynamics at the St.-Petersburg State University

2004 – Head of the Dept for Extreme States of Materials and Structures at the Inst Probl Mech Engng of the RAS

Research interests in theories of elasticity and plasticity, optimization problems, impact mechanics, dynamic fracture and deformation, structural transformations in a continuous medium, general problems of solid mechanics and physics

　Qingping SUN got his PhD in solid mechanics from Tsinghua University, Beijing in 1989. He is currently the Professor and Director of the Institute of Integrated Microsystems at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. His research activity in the past five years has focused on the experiment and modeling of the nonlinear, non-equilibrium and multi-physics coupled process in solid-solid phase transitions of shape memory alloys, including the thermal and mechanical behaviors during cyclic phase transitions and the resulting spatial-temporal structures. He was a visiting professor at several french universities and CNRS labs such as Ecole Polytechnique and ENS-Cachan. He also served as member of editorial board for several international journals and member of scientific committee for many inyternational conferences.

Prof. Dr. Reinhard Pippan was born on October 29, 1954 in Klagenfurt, Austria. From 1974-1980 he studied Physics at the Technical University Graz. In 1982 he received his PhD from the University of Leoben. In 1991 he received his habilitation for “Solid State Physics”. He is the temporary director and group leader at the Erich Schmid Institute of Materials Science, a part of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Pippan’s research activities are focused on mechanical properties of metals, alloys and composites. The improvement of the basic understanding of the relations between the mechanical behaviour, the deformation processes, the fracture processes, fatigue behaviour and the micro- and nano-structure of the materials are in focus of his group. In his career he has received numerous grants and several awards, supervised about 40 diploma and 25 PhD-students. He has more than 300 publications and contributed to several text books.

　Peter Gumbsch received the diploma degree in physics in 1988 and his PhD degree in 1991 from the University of Stuttgart. After extended visits at the Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, postdoctoral work at the Imperial College, London and the University of Oxford he returned to the Max-Planck-Institut in Stuttgart as a group leader and established the group »Modeling and Simulation of Thin Film Phenomena«. In 2001 he took the chair for Mechanics of Materials at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT and the position as head of Fraunhofer Intitute for Mechanics of Materials IWM in Freiburg and Halle and.
His research activities focus on modeling and simulation of materials, in particular multiscale modelling approaches. His activities cover atomistic simulation, mesoscopic modeling as well as macroscopic materials descriptions. Central research topics are deformation and fracture processes as well as interface properties in metals and ceramics. He has recently started new activities in the area of tribology.Amongst other recognitions he was awarded the Masing Memorial Award (1998) and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2007). He is chairman of the section Engineering Sciences of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2011 he was appointed as Advisory Professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.

　Vice Director, International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research(WPI-I2CNER), Kyushu University
Director, Research Center for Hydrogen Industrial Use and Storage(HYDROGENIUS), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（AIST)

　Since July of 2012, Dr. Ashok Saxena has served as the Vice-Chancellor of Galgotias University in Greater Noida in India. He served as the Dean of the College of Engineering, Distinguished Professor, and Irma and Raymond Giffels’ Chair at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville during 2003-2012 and on the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA for 18 years where he last held the title of Regents’ Professor.
Dr. Saxena is a Fellow of ASTM International and ASM International and an Academician of ICF-WASI, the World Academy of Structural Integrity. He is also a winner of the George Irwin Medal and the Fracture Mechanics Medal from ASTM and the Wohler Fatigue Medal from the European Structural Integrity Society, and more than a dozen other awards for his research in the area of Mechanical Behavior of Materials. He has published 175 papers and authored two textbooks.

　Jun Sun, received his Ph.D degree in Material Science from Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU) in 1989. After more than two years research in Queen’s University as an International Research Fellow of NSERC Canada he joined into the faculty of MSE of XJTU as a full professor in 1995. He is now the director of State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials and the head of School of MSE of XJTU. He was awarded the National Outstanding Young Investigator Grant of China in 1999, and is also the Cheung Kong Chair Professor of Material Science since 1999, as well as the Chief Scientist for a 973 project of China since 2004. His research interests are currently focusing on the mechanical behavior of materials at small length scale. He has published over 170 research articles in international journals. He has been invited as plenary speaker to several prestigious international conferences.