SEM Symposium at UT Austin : A great learning experience!
- kshitizu
- May 15
- 2 min read
Designing experiments and interpreting data is an art-one which often gets underestimated and overlooked today, in a world gravitating towards simulations and AI. Experiments have always been crucial for providing observations and testing hypotheses to advance theoretical understanding. But today, experiments help ground simulations and AI in reality by providing the data- the physical basis for training and validation. This is what keeps communities like the Society of Experimental Mechanics (SEM) thriving even today since its inception in the 1940s.
Contributing to the community
Professor Upadhyay and our lab have been active in the SEM community, presenting regularly at the annual conferences and even leading the time dependent materials division in the annual SEM conference this year.
In 2024, Professor Upadhyay along with Professor Jin Yang from UT Austin started the Southern SEM Student Symposium (SSEMSS), recognizing the need for a regional community in the Southern US States to foster the growing experimental mechanics research. The inaugural symposium was organized by Professor Upadhyay in LSU. The second iteration was held this year, organized by Professor Jin at UT Austin. Left: SSEMSS 2025 , Right: SSEMSS 2024
Immense Learning!
Spread over 2 days, the symposium consisted of 2 professor keynotes, 21 oral presentations by students and 15-20 student posters. This covered discussions on a wide range of topics:
Mechanics -Material failure, Squishy Granular Mechanics Crack Nucleation and more,
Materials- Soft tissues (brain, aorta), Metals, Nanomaterials, Polymers and more
Experiments- Poker Chip experiment, Wedge Indentation, Cavitation and more
Find all topics here:
The symposium also gave a opportunity to the students and professors to take a tour of the material science facilities at UT Austin. Besides these organized events during the larger part of both the days, students used this opportunity to visit more labs to discuss problems, experiments and even possible collaborations.
Sharing Our Research at SSEMSS 2025
Despite working across diverse mechanics problems and techniques - from inverse finite element modeling to neural imaging, what unites us at the Soft Material Mechanics Lab is our commitment to experimental grounding . This allowed us all to share a different story from our research experience on mechanics of soft materials. Our participation at SSEMSS 2025 included a keynote by Professor Upadhyay , 4 oral presentations and 2 posters:
Keynote Lecture: “Constitutive Modeling of Soft Materials: Past, Present, Future”
Oral Presentations
Siddharth Sriram: Visco-Hyperelastic Calibration of Bovine Brainstem using a One-Shot Indentation Approach with Inverse Finite Element Method.
Nihar Moghe: Physics-Informed Cokriging: An Intuitive and Efficient Technique for Imputing Missing Data in DIC.
Yogesh Chandrashekhar: Tension-Compression Failure Asymmetry in Soft Materials using Logarithmic Strain Invariant-Based Hyperelasticity.
Austin Zeringue: High Strain Rate Characterization of Regolith Shape Memory Polymer Composites for Lunar Applications.
🔹 Poster Presentations
Ethan Blackwell: J-Integral Framework for Optimizing 3D Printing Parameters for Fracture Resistance in Shape Memory Polymers
Shovon: AI-Based Automated Neural Cell Phenotype Identification
Finding friends in researchers
While we spent most of the day deep in research discussions, we took some downtime in the evenings, taking a walk on Austin's streets, sharing meals with fellow researchers and building cross-university friendships!
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