NSA-UPRH Regional Conference on Global Continuation Methods

Principal Lecturer

The principal lecturer for this conference series will be Tim Healey, Professor of Mechanics and Applied Mathematic at Cornell University. Healey was an Evans Scholar at the University of Missouri. After receiving a B.S. from that institution and then an M.S. from the University of Illinois in Civil Engineering, he worked as a licensed structural engineer for Agbabian Associates of Los Angeles for two years. He then returned to Illinois and completed his doctoral work in mechanics

Healey's research areas include nonlinear elasticity and modern nonlinear analysis, with applications to structures and solids, biological filaments and martensitic phase transitions. The two primary goals of his work are to detect new physical and/or mathematical phenomena and to develop efficient solution strategies enabling either rigorous analysis and/or efficient numerical computations in such problems.

His current research areas include:

	The study of static and dynamic problems associated with microstructure evolution due to forced phase transitions in two-dimensional models of shape-memory alloys.
	The development of degree--theoretic tools for global continuation and bifurcation in concrete problems of three-dimensional nonlinear elastostatics in the presence of parameter-dependent forcing.
	To study thin elastic structures possessing a uniform helical micro-structure in their natural state. Examples motivating our work include man-made ropes and cables, and biological filaments occurring in nature, e.g. mammalian tendon and DNA strands.