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23rd Biennial Conference on Mechanical Vibration and Noise (VIB) C. D. (Dan) Mote, Jr. 23rd Biennial Conference on Mechanical Vibration and Noise Keynote Speaker The 21st Century Global Innovation Environment Abstract The U.S. 'national innovation environment' was created through a partnership between government, industry and universities following the famed Vannevar Bush report, Science the Endless Frontier, delivered to President Truman in 1945. The report delineated responsibilities to government, industry and universities for the national health, welfare and security. This partnership was remarkably successful until it broke down in the decade of the nineties. The world has changed substantially since the beginning of the Cold War. Where the government-industry-university partnership initiated sixty years ago resided entirely on a national platform, today those partnerships sit on a global platform. For instance, there is essentially no national industry today; science and engineering for industry are global. Strong national interest clearly remains in industry, but other issues dominate industry's decisions on where science and engineering investments should be made. Governments' major issues are global too. Currency valuation, climate change, alternative energy, pandemics, food supply and safety, environment, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and security, and so forth mandate partnerships between governments to address. With industry and government already finding it essential to work on the global platform, the world's principal research universities must also operate there if they are to fulfill their missions along with industry and government. This lecture will address the transition to the global innovation environment that is underway and its implications. Biography C. D. (Dan) Mote, Jr. is Regents Professor and Glenn L. Martin Institute Professor of Engineering and past President, at the University of Maryland over the last thirteen years. He serves as an officer of the National Academy of Engineering, on the National Research Council Governing Board and on NRC committees concerned with issues of innovation and national competitiveness in engineering and science. His research focuses on dynamic and gyroscopic systems, and on biomechanics. Prior to his arrival at University of Maryland, he was a member of the faculty at University of California, Berkeley for more than 30 years. He served as chair of the mechanical engineering department and vice chancellor from 1988 to 1998. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an Honorary Member of ASME. Noel Perkins 23rd Biennial Conference on Mechanical Vibration and Noise Keynote Speaker Computing the Twisted Mechanics of Your DNA Abstract DNA encodes the genetic information required for synthesizing life-sustaining proteins within your cells. While the chemical composition of DNA has been known for over 50 years, many unresolved questions remain regarding how the structure of DNA affects its biological functions. By 'structure' we refer to the shape and stress of the molecule and how these control DNA's primary functions including transcription, replication and gene repair. This long and highly flexible bio-polymer readily twists and bends to form "long-length" scale structures including loops and supercoils that can regulate transcription, replication and repair. How these loops and supercoils form, the energy required for their formation, and the dynamics and thermal stability of these structures are among the issues we probe using both theoretical and experimental methods. This talk provides an overview of a computational rod model that simulates the twisting/bending dynamics of DNA during large conformational changes of the molecule. The rod model, which captures the dynamics on length scales of a helical turn and longer (>3nm), incorporates the physics of arbitrarily-large twisting/bending of the helical axis, DNA-protein interactions, electrostatic interactions, and the hydrodynamics of the surrounding buffer. These effects will be highlighted in a series of example systems that include the looping of DNA by a gene-regulatory protein, the twisting of DNA in forming supercoils, the dynamic relaxation of these supercoils by enzymes, and the dynamic ejection of DNA from a viral capsid. A multi-scale modeling approach will also be described that combines a molecular dynamics description of proteins (atomistic length/time scales) interacting with a continuum description of DNA (long length/time scales). Biography Noel Perkins is the Donald T. Greenwood Collegiate Professor of Engineering and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. He earned his Ph.D at U. C. Berkeley in 1986 (Mechanical Engineering) prior to joining the faculty at Michigan. His research interests draw from the fields of computational, nonlinear and structural dynamics with applications to the mechanics of single molecule DNA and DNA/protein complexes, wireless inertial sensors for analyzing human motion, and the dynamics of cable structures, vehicle systems, and axially moving materials. He presently serves as the Editor of the ASME J. Vibration and Acoustics and has previously served in editorial capacities for the ASME J. Applied Mechanics (Associate Editor), the Journal of Vibration and Control (Member, Editorial Board), the International Journal of Non-linear Mechanics (Guest Editor), and the Journal of Sound and Vibration (Member, Editorial Board). He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a recipient of the General Motors Outstanding Distance Learning Faculty Award (twice), the Academic Challenge Award from the Technical University of Munich, the Amoco Undergraduate Teaching Award and several other teaching awards from the University of Michigan. He remains active in commercialization activities for MEMS-based sports training systems, and is founding partner of Cast Analysis, LLC that manufactures a fly casting training system.