Mahmoud Hussein, a post-doctoral researcher, was one of only 20 professors, post-doctoral scholars and PhD candidates nationwide awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellowship to attend the Foundation's Summer Institute short course on "Multiscale Modeling and Simulation of Nano Mechanics and Materials."
The week-long course was held at Northwestern University and consisted of lectures, hands-on workshops and laboratory tours. The NSF's objectives in offering the program are to identify and promote important areas of nanotechnology to augment current research and development by universities, industries and government and to train future and practicing engineers, scientists and educators in the emerging areas of nanotechnology, nanomechanics, and nano-materials. The program also provides valuable networking opportunities for researchers and leaders in the field.
According to Hussein, the course helped researchers with traditional engineering training "realize the remarkable benefits of exploring their problems through a multiscale perspective. This enhances the scope of research because it allows one to exploit knowledge and tools acquired and developed by both the engineering and basic sciences communities."
Hussein's work is in the area of wave propagation in periodic materials and structures. He has been addressing research problems at the continuum level, "but the course helped me see how it could extend to applications at much smaller scales. As much as there are differences across scales, interestingly, there are plenty of similarities, which make it encouraging to engage in collaborative interdisciplinary work."
He said the week-long event was a good opportunity to interact with scientists and engineers from around the country who share a similar interest in and curiosity about nano systems. In addition, course content dovetailed with his dissertation, entitled "Dynamics of Banded Materials and Structures: Analysis, Design and Computation in Multiple Scales" (see accompanying images). Professors Greg Hulbert and Richard Scott served as his thesis advisors.
Hussein also earned first prize in the student paper competition at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society of Engineering Science held in Ann Arbor in October 2003. The paper was titled, "A Multiscale Reduced Order Model for Computing Frequency Spectra of Periodic Materials."