PhD student Kun Wang and postdoc research scientist Dr. Chuanqi Liu have received travel grant to present their work at the upcoming Meshfree and Particle Methods: Application and Theory, to be held in Santa Fe, NM, September 10-12, 2018. Chuanqi will present his previous work conducted at Tsinghua University, while Kun will discuss his work on metal-modeling of complex materials in the poster session. The support will cover the registration and travel for both team members. We thank the organizers for providing the support to us. 

It is my great pleasure to announce that my PhD student SeonHong Na has accepted a tenure-track position as assistant professor in the department of civil engineering at McMaster University in Canada. He will officially join McMaster in the spring of 2019. SeonHong joined our research group as PhD student in Fall 2014 after obtained his B.S. (2008) and M.S. (2010) in civil engineering from Seoul National University, Korea. Prior to joining Columbia, he worked as a civil engineer for two years (Kunhwa, Korea) and spent another two years in Coastal Development & Ocean Energy Division in Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology (KIOST) as a research scientist. SeonHong's research is currently funded by Army Research Office (frozen soil) and the DOE NEUP (crystalline rock) as well as the Fulbright Fellowship and has just recently graduated in July 2018. He is the 2nd PhD graduated from our group and the 3rd research group members who secured tenure-track position, following Yang Liu (Northeastern) and Jinhyun Choo (University of Hong Kong) since 2014. His published journal articles during the last 3+ years at Columbia are listed below. 

Congratulations again, SeonHong! ​

• S. Na, W.C. Sun, Wave propagation and strain localization in a fully saturated softening porous medium under the non-isothermal conditions, International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics, doi:10.1002/nag.2505, 2016. [PDF][Bibtex]
• K. Wang, W.C. Sun, S. Salager, S. Na, G. Khaddour, Identifying material parameters for a micro-polar plasticity model via X-ray micro-CT images: lessons learned from the curve-fitting exercises, International Journal of Multiscale Computational Engineering, 14(4):389-413,  doi:10.1615/IntJMultCompEng.2016016841, 2016. [PDF][Bibtex]
• S. Na, W.C. Sun, Computational thermo-hydro-mechanics for multiphase freezing and thawing porous media in the finite deformation range, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 2017. [DRAFT][Bibtex]​
• S. Na, W.C. Sun, H. Yoon, M. Ingraham, Effects of elastic heterogeneity on the fracture pattern and macroscopic effective toughness of Mancos Shale in Brazilian Tests, Journal of Geophysical Research:Solid Earth, accepted, ​2017.
• S.H. Jang, S. Na, Y-L Park, Magnetically Assisted bilayer composites for soft bending actuators, materials, 10(6), 646, doi:10.3390/ma10060646, 2017. [PDF] (unaffiliated research conducted with the Dr. Sung-Hwan Jang). 
• S. Na, W.C. Sun, Computational thermomechanics of crystalline rock. Part I: a combined multi-phase-field/crystal plasticity approach for single crystal simulations, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, accepted, 2018.
• S. Na, E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, Capturing size effects of anisotropic fluid-infiltrating materials via a higher-order Cam-clay-type model with property-preserving adaptive meshing, in preparation., in preparation. 
• S. Na, W.C. Sun,  phase field modeling of fracture opening, interfacial frictional closure and capillary-driven flow in porous media, in preparation.