The tenth biennial Pan American Congress of Applied Mechanics (PACAM X) will be organized in Cancun, Mexico January 7th 2008, through January 11th 2008. The Intellectual Merit of the conference is to expose engineers, scientists, and advanced graduate students to new research developments, problems, and potential collaborative opportunities in the areas of composite materials, computational mechanics, controls, dynamics, fluid mechanics, sensors and monitoring, and solid and structural mechanics. Previous PACAM conferences have successfully achieved these goals but with a decline in participation in recent years, especially among US graduate students. Therefore, the emphasis of this 10th international PACAM is to assemble a strong and successful gathering of constituents to help stabilize the future of PACAM and to emphasize the leadership role that the U.S. continues to carry in the broad field of mechanics.
Despite the number of students in mechanics attending northern universities and the importance of mechanics in the economic development in the Latin Americas, the technical interaction is less than it should be between the two hemispheres. In this light, the Broader Impacts of the conference are to provide US graduate students with an opportunity to: 1) present their research on an international platform and attain visibility, 2) establish potential collaborations with other researchers, and 3) participate in potential student exchanges. The PACAM conferences are important in this regard because they enable these students as well as Latin American participants to engage with scholars from all over the world during a time when there are few other competing conferences.
