The Ninth Pan American Congress of Applied Mechanics (PACAM IX) will be held January 2-6, 2006, in Merida, Mexico. The Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) will be the host institution for this biennial conference. Past meetings have provided outstanding venues for enhancing communication among the engineering scholarly communities of the Americas. For PACAM IX, the proximity of Mexico to the U.S. mainland will enable relatively inexpensive travel for U.S. participants, but will threaten Latin American participation. Therefore, the requested NSF support to subsidize attendance by scholars from outside the U.S. is critical. The consensus is that PACAM IX will foster, in the spirit of NAFTA, hemispheric cooperation and enhance the appropriate hemispheric leadership role of the U.S. in engineering and specifically, applied mechanics. Dissemination of research presented at the meeting will be through a proceedings publication and selected papers published in a special issue of the International Journal of Solids and Structures.
