Werner Hauger studied Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at the University of Karlsruhe and received his Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Northwestern University in Evanston. He worked in industry for several years, was a Professor at the Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg and went to the University of Darmstadt in 1978. His research interests are, among others, theory of stability, dynamic plasticity and biomechanics.

Jörg Schröder studied Civil Engineering, received his doctoral degree at the University of Hannover and habilitated at the University of Stuttgart. He was Professor of Mechanics at the University of Darmstadt and went to the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2001. His fields of research are theoretical and computer-oriented continuum mechanics, modeling of functional materials as well as the further development of the finite element method.

Wolfgang A. Wall studied Civil Engineering at Innsbruck University and received his doctoral degree from the University of Stuttgart. Since 2003 he is Professor of Mechanics at the TU München and Head of the Institute for Computational Mechanics. His research interests cover broad fields in computational mechanics, including both solid and fluid mechanics. His recent focus is on multiphysics and multiscale problems as well as computational biomechanics.

Sanjay Govindjee received his SB from MIT and an MS and PhD from Stanford University in mechanical engineering. He was an engineering analyst at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1991-93) andProfessor of Mechanics at ETH Zurich (2006-08). Currently he is a Chancellor's Professor and Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of California Berkeley (1993-2006, 2008-present). His expertise lies in computational mechanics and the modeling of materials based upon molecular and atomic structure with a particular emphasis upon polymeric based materials, large deformations, and inelastic phenomena.