Antonio DeSimone
Full Professor of Structural Mechanics (ICAR08) since 2002. His scientific interests include the mathematical modelling of the mechanical properties of condensed matter and new materials, the mechanics of biological systems, and the response of solids beyond the linear elasticity regime and in the presence of electro-magneto-mechanical interactions.
He is the author of more than 60 scientific publications on the mechanics of “soft” and granular materials, non-linear elasticity, plasticity and damage, electromagnetism and phase transitions, the wetting properties of natural and artificial ultra-hydrophobic surfaces, and the self-propulsion of microorganisms.
He has held numerous research positions abroad (University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University, Université Paris XIII, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications in Minneapolis).
He has given invited lectures at many major Italian, European (Cambridge, Oxford, École Polytechnique, Paris 6, 11 and 13, Universities of Bonn, Hannover and Stuttgart, Technical Universities of Berlin, Munich and Vienna) and American (Caltech, MIT, Courant Institute at NYU, Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton) universities.
He has been an invited speaker at several dozen international conferences. He was a plenary speaker at GAMM2004 in Dresden, where he gave a general talk on multiscale methods for predicting the mechanical response of materials, and at the 7th Euromech Solid Mechanics Conference in Lisbon in 2009.
He has co-organised more than 10 international workshops and conferences, including the SIAM Conference on Mathematical Aspects of Materials Science (Philadelphia, 2008).
In 2008 he co-coordinated with L. Colombo the Advanced School on “Brittle Fracture and Plastic Slip: from the Atomistic to the Engineering Scale” at CISM in Udine, where he also served as a lecturer in 2007 (“Rank-one convexity, Quasiconvexity and Polyconvexity in Applied Mechanics”) and 2009 (“Mechanics and Electrodynamics of Magneto- and Electro-Elastic Materials”).
He received the Keith Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2007.
He is a member of the Technical Committee on Microstructures of the Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM), and serves on the editorial boards of the international journals:
Applied Mathematics Research Express (since 2003), Continuum Mechanics and Thermodynamics (since 2005), Networks and Heterogeneous Media (since 2005), Communications in Mathematical Sciences (since 2007), SIAM Journal of Mathematical Analysis (since 2007).
From 1998 to 2003 he was director of the research group on “Multiscale Phenomena in Materials” at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. A defining feature of this group — made up of mathematicians, engineers and physicists — was the attempt to embrace the widest possible range of perspectives on each problem addressed, through the development and analysis of mathematical models, their numerical simulation and comparison with experimental evidence. Current research continues in the same multidisciplinary spirit. More details are available at http://people.sissa.it/~desimone/
He has been the SISSA Director’s Delegate for Technology Transfer since 2006. Trieste, 30.11.2008