Joseph Cusumano, professor of engineering science and mechanics, and his students attended the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 2013 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences in Portland, Oregon, August 4-7. The conference is the flagship international meeting for design engineering and included 14 conferences this year.

Dr. Cusumano led a technical session, titled Nonlinear Resonances, Phenomena, and Interactions, for the 9th International Conference on Multibody Systems, Nonlinear Dynamics, and Control and co-chaired a Vibration Control session for the 25th Conference on Mechanical Vibration and Noise. For each session, the groups reviewed technical publications and student competition papers.

Akhlesh Lakhtakia, the Charles Godfrey Binder Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, traveled to India for a conference on Metamaterials and Photonoic Nanostructures, hosted by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK), August 16-17.

The two-day conference was organized by the Department of Physics at IITK and the Instruments Research and Development Establishment at Dehradun. The program included presentations of state-of-the-art developments in metamaterials and nanophotonics and, with a plan to identify new applications and technologies, identified the emerging themes in these areas.

Dr. Lakhtakia presented a talk titled “Surface multiplasmonics and Dyakonov-Tamm waves,” that focused on multiple surface plasmon polariton waves and Dyakonov-Tamm waves when a periodically non-homogenous sculptured thin film is a partnering material.