June 13-15: SEM Annual Conference & Exposition on Experimental and Applied Mechanics in Uncasville, CT. We win the Award for Best Paper: “The Mechanical Performance of Teleost Fish Scales”  (Biological Systems and Materials Division)

April 29: Congratulations to Sacheen who succesfully defended his PhD thesis: "Numerical Models for the Deformation and Fracture of Natural Composites"

April 27: Congratulations to Reza who succesfully defended his PhD thesis: "Deformation and Fracture of Mineralized Biological Materials"

April 15: Visit and seminar at the University of Colorado at Boulder

April 7: Our paper "Nacre from mollusk shells: a model for high-performance structural materials" is one of the 7 highlighted articles for 2010 in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. Since august 2010 it has been downloaded more than 700 times!

February 28: Our article on a new "artificial nacre" was accepted for publication in the Journal of Materials  Research

January 3: Welcome to our two new PhD students Lawrence and Mohammad. Lawrence holds a Master in Zoology from the University of Guelph and he will be working on the mechanics of fish scales. Mohammad obtained his Master from Nayang Technological University; he will be focusing on fabricating new "artificial nacres"

January 3: Our article on toughness amplification was accepted for publication in the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids


2010


December 1st: We have presented two talks and one poster at the Materials Research Society Fall meeting in Boston.

November 13: ASME IMECE in Vancouver, BC

November 19: Invited talk: “High-performance composites inspired from nature” University of British Columbia (Advanced Materials Process Engineering Laboratories)

September 1: Welcome to our two new PhD students Mercedes and Atefeh, who will be co-supervised by David Frost.

June 30: Our new subset splitting image correlation (SSDIC) Matlab routines are now available for free here

June 11: Francois Barthelat gives an invited Seminar at Purdue University

June 7-10: SEM Annual Conference & Exposition on Experimental and Applied Mechanics in Indianapolis

March 1: Welcome to our new PostDoc Deju Zhu Reza, Sacheen and Jeff present their research to the Chris Barrett group meeting in the Department of Chemistry

January 29: Francois Barthelat gives a talk on Biomimetic Materials to students at the John Abbott College, Montreal

January 3: Welcome to our new PhD student Ahmad Khayer Dastjerdi


2009

September 3: Welcome to our new PhD student Ramak Motamedi

July 25: Group Picnic and night soccer on the Saint Helene Island!

July 12-17: 12th International Conference on Fracture (ICF12) in Ottawa, ON. We brought back the Best Paper Award by a Young Researcher for our paper “Micromechanics of fracture in nacre from mollusk shells”. Congratulations to Reza

June 1-4: Society of Experimental Mechanics Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, NM

May 31-June 4: Mostafa presents his paper: “Multiscale modeling and optimization of gastropod shells” at the Canadian Congress of Applied Mechanics (CANCAM) May 31-June 4 in Halifax (co-authored by F. Barthelat and D. Pasini)
February 3: Congratulations to Jeffrey: his paper " “A Novel “Subset Splitting” Procedure for Digital Image Correlation on Discontinuous Displacement Fields” went on line (Experimental Mechanics)


January 3-7: invited talk at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting in Boston, MA.