The Center for Materials Science and Engineering of the University of Edinburgh was founded in 1999 as an interdisciplinary research center joining academics working on different aspects of materials behavior across traditional departmental boundaries. It includes over 40 academics from the schools of physics, chemistry, engineering and geosciences. The UEDIM academics participating in the consortium are internationally recognized in multiscale materials modeling with particular emphasis on irreversible deformation and failure processes, using a wide range of modeling techniques and applying them to materials problems ranging from the atomic to the geomaterials scale. UEDIM brings also key expertise in the integration of complex systems modeling, laboratory experiments and macroscale data analysis into a comprehensive picture of geohazard genesis and evolution.

Team Leader: Michael Zaiser is Reader in computational materials science at the School of Engineering and Electronics, the University of Edinburgh. He has published over 80 papers on irreversible deformation and failure of materials. In particular, he has pioneered the introduction of statistical mechanics approaches into multiscale materials modeling, with particular emphasis on continuum representations of the structure and dynamics of discrete defect microstructures, size effects in mechanical properties, and the role of materials heterogeneity in deformation and failure. He is member of the editorial board of the Journal of Statistical Mechanics and has acted as organizer of 7 international conferences, symposia and workshops on plasticity, deformation instabilities, and multiscale modeling of deformation and failure processes.

Additional participants

Joachim Heierli: He is Research Associate at the Centre for Materials Science and Engineering of the University of Edinburgh since January 2006. After working several years for the Swiss Institute for Materials Science and Testing EMPA, Boschung Mecatronic and Siemens Building Technologies, he joined SLF in August 2002 where he developped a non-linear wave model for fracture propagation in snow. He first met with Michael Zaiser in 2005 and visited him in Rome a few weeks later. They subsequently worked on understanding the role of volumic collapse in the failure of snow stratifications. His current position in the research team of Michael Zaiser emerged naturally from this collaboration.

Graeme Ackland: Director of the EPSRC-funded complexity research cluster “Novel approaches to realistic networks of interacting autonomes”.

Ian Main: He is Research Associate at the Centre for Materials Science and Engineering of the University of Edinburgh since January 2006. After working several years for the Swiss Institute for Materials Science and Testing EMPA, Boschung Mecatronic and Siemens Building Technologies, he joined SLF in August 2002 where he developped a non-linear wave model for fracture propagation in snow. He first met with Michael Zaiser in 2005 and visited him in Rome a few weeks later. They subsequently worked on understanding the role of volumic collapse in the failure of snow stratifications. His current position in the research team of Michael Zaiser emerged naturally from this collaboration.

John  Greenhough: Research Associate at the Centre for Materials Science and Engineering of the University of Edinburgh. His research involves the analysis of correlations in time series for earthquakes and subsurface fluid flow, in order to quantify the Earth’s response to both natural and man-made stress perturbations and hence predict this response more accurately and precisely. A novel, parsimonious Statistical Reservoir Model is being developed and tested on a number of North Sea oilfields and on regional earthquake rates.

Jane Blackford
Chris Hall
Vasileios Koutsos