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Welcome! – Some quick notes:

The Workshop will be on the 10th Floor of Weiser Hall (**generally still called Dennison if you google it**). It is the tall building at 500 Church St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.

There will be coffee and cold drinks as you arrive, and some snacks at first break. Then Lunch and snacks at second break, each day.

There are some updates to some of the short talk titles and abstracts.

Welcome to this weeklong workshop on Complex Mechanical Metamaterials taking place on the University of Michigan campus in beautiful downtown Ann Arbor.

About Mechanical Metamaterials

For centuries, new materials have been engineered and utilized by producing a substance, processing it in a certain way so as to influence its random microstructure, and deforming it into a useful shape, such as a tempered steel rod. Metamaterials upend this paradigm and blur the distinction between material and shape by imparting controlled, regular repeating geometric structures at any length scale from the atomic to the macroscopic. Such metamaterials first drew attention by achieving supposedly impossible properties, such as negative Poisson’s ratios or indices of refraction.

During the past decade, mechanical metamaterials have expanded beyond achieving negative moduli and bandgap engineering to a variety of robust, adaptive complex functions, buoyed by nonlinear and stimuli-responsive elements and collective behavior such as topological and conformal modes. These advances allow functionality associated with devices, living organisms and computers to be infused into the very structure of a system.

This workshop will play a key role in uniting metamaterials researchers, facilitating collaboration and coordination, and presenting a unifying vision for the key challenges facing the community. 

Example topics:

·      Topologically protected mechanical states in ordered and disordered structures

·      Effect of geometric and material nonlinearity on metamaterials

·      Bio-inspired and biomimetic metamaterials

·      Smart metamaterials capable of memory, learning and information-processing

·      Novel mathematical concepts for metamaterials: duality, supersymmetry, conformal invariance, and non-Euclidean geometry

·      Optimization: the structures yielding the strongest, toughest, most efficient and smartest response subject to real-world constraints

·      Novel fabrication methods of metamaterials: self-assembly, directed aging, and 3D printing

·      Active metamaterials: broken time-reversal-symmetry (TRS), actuation, locomotion and robotics

·      Stimuli-responsive metamaterials under light, heat, and chemical signals

This workshop will play a key role in uniting metamaterials researchers, facilitating collaboration and coordination, and presenting a unifying vision for the key challenges facing the community.