Objective
After five years in the US, first as a doctoral student at Northwestern University and later as a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), the researcher intends to return to his home country, Spain, and accept a tenure-tra ck four year position as an assistant professor at the Universitat Politica de Catalunya, Barcelona. The proposed research aims to develop methods that bridge the gap between accurate atomistic models of matter and meaningful predictions for micro and nano-scale complex devices, engineered systems, as well as biological systems, with a focus on the mechanics of crystalline solids and macromolecules. In many applications of interest, this gap exists because a wide range of temporal and spatial scales are operative and interact in a complex manner. This renders simple models useless and accurate atomistic calculations unable to access relevant scales, and calls for multi-scale models. While there have been numerous advances in modelling and simulation across multiple scales, satisfactory theories and technologies are far from being achieved.
This proposal intends to push the frontier of knowledge in this field, to validate the new methods against micro and nano-scale experiments, and to apply these methods to problems of basic science and engineering. This interdisciplinary research, at the interface of applied mathematics, computational engineering, materials science, physics and biology, will benefit from the experience of the researcher on the mechanics of carbon nano-tubes at Northwestern University, and on multi-scale computational methods at CalTech. The US has vigorously invested efforts in the last years in the proposed field of research, and plays a dominant role. Thus the project contributes the EU competitiveness in an area, which can strongly impact the field of nano-bio-technology. The project involves the training of a doctoral student.
Fields of science
Keywords
Call for proposal
FP6-2004-MOBILITY-12
See other projects for this call
Coordinator
BARCELONA
Spain