The Institute started both the M.S. and Ph.D. degree programs with seven faculty members and thirty-eight graduate students in the Fall of 1984. It has grown to the current size of 30 faculty members and 191 graduate students (155 M.S. students and 36 Ph.D. students). The Institute is aimed to cultivate high-level talented persons in advanced mechanics. All the graduate students are required to be well trained in mechanics by taking mathematics, theoretical and experimental courses. The research of the Institute was originally targeted at defense-related basic research. Since 1994, the Institute has been diverting toward scientific and technological trends of the world that meet the needs of the nation’s development.
Over the past 30 years, the Institute has developed strengths in several fields, which include dynamics and control, mechanics of materials, waves in continuum media, hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, two- and multi-phase flow, micro- and nano- electro-mechanical systems (MEMS & NEMS), biomechanics and imaging, and micro- and nano-fluidics as well as in energy and environmental research. Recently, the faculty members have further identified three major fields in connection with ‘mechanics in nano- revolution’:
Waves and MEMS/NEMS: with focus on the analyses and applications of the elastic waves and electromagnetic waves and their interactions;
Nano-biomechanics: with focus on the examination of characteristics and interactions of micro- or nano-scale biological structures by mechanics approach; Meso-scale Mechanics, with focus on the exploration of the analytic, experimental, and computational aspects of the systems in multi-scales.
In addition to the above sketch of research strengths of the Institute, there are always new research results coming up out of innovative ideas and intensified efforts by the faculty and the students of the Institute.