McCormick Symposium Honored Toshio Mura

A symposium in honor of Toshio Mura, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering, was held at Northwestern University on May 24 and 25.

The theme of the symposium was, "Recent Advances in Nano-Micromechanics of Materials."

Mura, who passed away in August 2009, was born in Ono, a small port village of Kanazawa, Japan. He received a doctorate in the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Tokyo in 1954. He taught at Meiji University, Japan, from 1954 to 1958. In 1958, he came to the United States to work in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern. He became a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering in 1966 and also held an appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He retired from Northwestern in 1996.

In addition to numerous published research papers, he was the author of three books, including Micromechanics of Defects in Solids. For his achievements, he was appointed Walter P. Murphy Professor in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern, was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to the field of micromechanics, and received many other accolades for his work.

The symposium, organized by Morris Fine, Walter P. Murphy and Technological Institute Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering in Service, and Leon Keer, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, features speakers from across the field and included such topics as nano-micromechanics of nano-materials and materials containing nano-features; computational nano-micromechanics; electronic devices with micro and nanosize components; and nano/micromechanics modeling and experiments.

Speakers included:
- J. Qu, Northwestern University
- S. Nemat-Nasser, University of California San Diego
- Yuki Nakasone, Tokyo University of Science
- H. Sekine, Tohoku University
- X. Markenscoff, University of California San Diego
- L. Ni, Northwestern University
- J. Dundurs, Northwestern University
- Noboru Kikuchi, University of Michigan
- I. Watanabe, Toyota Central R&D Labs.
- T. Belytschko, Northwestern University
- I. Jasiuk, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
- Tetsuo Iwakuma, Tohoku University,
- Y. Sumi Yokohama National University,
- Hiroyuki Abé, Tohoku University
- L.M. Keer, Northwestern University
- Y. Yao, Northwestern University
- M.E. Fine, Northwestern University
- Minoru Taya, University of Washington
- M. Nango, Nagoya Institute of Technology
- M. Natori, Waseda University
- K. Higashida, Kyushu University
- M. Hori, Tokyo University
- K. Tsuchiya, NIMS
- M. Umemoto, Toyohashi University of Tech.
- Horacio Espinosa, Northwestern University
- Tsutomu Mori, University of Manchester