Professor Alexandra Boltasseva has been invited to speak at the 2015 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (US FOE) scheduled for September 9-11, 2015, at the National Academies' Beckman Center in Irvine, California. The total number of participants at the symposium will be about 100 engineers, ages 30-45, from industry, academia, and government labs. She was also nominated and asked to attend in 2012.

The goal of the Frontiers program is to bring together emerging leaders in engineering and provide them with an opportunity to learn about and discuss leading-edge research and technical work across a range of engineering fields. The FOE website is www.naefrontiers.org<http://www.naefrontiers.org>.

Optical and Mechanical Metamaterials session abstract

The ability to engineer the properties of high-performance materials is critical for applications ranging from high-efficiency energy production and storage to advanced medical imaging and therapeutics.  The principle of "metamaterials" refers to the design of composites whose properties derive as much from their structure as from their composition.  Metamaterials have energized many materials engineering disciplines, leading not only to the discovery of a powerful "toolbox" of new design methods, but to an expansion in our fundamental understanding of the physics of materials.  Metamaterials have been particularly impactful in the fields of mechanics and photonics, where a number of conventionally accepted bounds on material performance have been re-evaluated, and a great array of surprising, and often useful, properties have been discovered.

For example, optical metamaterials have enabled control over both the electric and magnetic fields of light, so that permittivities and permeabilities can be precisely tuned throughout positive, negative, and near-zero values. Though careful design of subwavelength 'meta-atoms', optical metamaterials have enabled negative refraction, optical lensing below the diffraction limit of light and invisibility cloaking.  Likewise, based on their micron-to-submicron structure, mechanical metamaterials exhibit extraordinary responses to applied forces, including negative bulk moduli, negative Poisson's ratios, and negative mass densities.  Such effects have been used to create solids that behave like liquids and ultra-light, low-density materials with unprecedented strength.

This session will highlight the impact of recent scientific advances in metamaterials, including fundamental breakthroughs and technological relevance. Speakers will discuss a breadth of topics including metallic and ceramic mechanical metamaterials, compliant mechanisms, new plasmonic and resonant dielectric optical metamaterials and metasurfaces, acoustic metamaterials, microelectromechanical devices, and advanced nano and micro-scale manufacturing of large-area metamaterials.