Dear colleagues,

As you may know, the 55^th Society of Engineering Science (SES) Annual Technical Meeting will take place from October 12 to 14, 2018, in Madrid, Spain.

At the invitation of the organizers, we are putting together the Mini-Symposium 4.4 on the “Mechanics and Physics of Soft Materials” (see http://www.ses2018.org/?s=track-symposia). We would like to invite you (or one of your students or collaborators) to participate in our mini-symposium.

The deadline for abstract submission (http://www.ses2018.org/?s=abstract-submission) is April 15, 2018.

For more information, please visit the conference website: http://www.ses2018.org

We hope that you can accept this invitation and look forward to seeing you in Madrid,

Mini-Symposium Scope:

The study of soft materials continues to drive our community into new exciting directions. This mini-symposium will address recent experimental, theoretical, and computational advances in the mechanics and physics of solids capable of undergoing large deformations in response to mechanical, electromagnetic, chemical, and thermal stimuli. Topics of particular interest include:

• Electroactive and magnetoactive elastomers
• Gels
• Shape-memory polymers
• Liquid crystal elastomers
• Multi-scale computational modelling of soft active solids
• Instabilities in soft active solids with and without microstructure
• Fracture and healing of elastomers and gels

With best regards

Oscar Lopez-Pamies (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Kostas Danas (CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, France)