An Institute of Mechanics and Materials (IMM) is being established at the University of California at San Diego to integrate research and industrial applications in mechanics and materials. The Institute will foster interdisciplinary communication and liaison between academia, industry and governmental organizations. The principal activities will include short courses on frontier, interdisciplinary areas; workshops on specific industrial problems and innovative materials; and short and intermediate length visits of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, faculty members, and scientists and engineers form government laboratories and industrial organizations. The Institute will not conduct extensive research projects, per se, but will aim to serve as an intellectual forum to catalyze the formation of research groups when new areas or methods of approach are identified. This will include novel techniques for materials development, synthesis and processing; characterization and identification of properties-microstructure relations; physically-based micromechanical and computational modeling; and constitutive relations for nonlinear response and failure analysis; as well as design and performance analysis of complete structural entities. Timely topics will be discussed in think-tank-style workshops which will also be used for periodic assessments of long-term goals in mechanics and materials science and engineering. An external Board of Governors of prominent senior scientists and engineers will direct the Institute activities through action subcommittees and regularly assess the Institute's progress. The educational efforts of the Institute will include all levels of engineers and scientists in academia, industry and government (both national and international); and a strong outreach program to high school students and their teachers on a nationwide basis wherever there is interest, with a deliberate effort to reach minorities and under-represented segments of the population, as well as the gifted.
