BIOT-8 is pleased to welcome the following distinguished plenary speakers:

Homogenization enriched with spatial correlation functions for geomaterials

Chloé Arson, Ph.D.
Professor, M.Eng. Director, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Cornell University

Dr. Chloé Arson is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University. Prior to Cornell, she was a faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology (2012-2023) and at Texas A&M University (2009-2012). She earned her Ph.D. at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (France) in 2009. Dr. Arson’s expertise is in computational geomechanics, with a particular focus on damage and healing mechanics of polycrystalline materials, multi-scale modeling of porous media, and model reduction informed by deep learning. Her group developed modeling approaches that have allowed a fundamental understanding of synergetic micro-mechanisms in rocks, the prediction of instabilities in geomaterials, and the simulation of concurrent fracture propagation at multiple scales. Homogenization, computational mechanics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the pillars of Arson’s work. 

Inter-disciplinary collaborations have enabled her group to deploy modeling strategies for civil engineering, Earth sciences, mechanical engineering, material sciences, and biology. Dr. Arson received the CAREER and BRITE awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), in 2016 and 2021 respectively. 
 

Robert Zimmerman, Ph.D.
Professor, Chair in Rock Mechanics Department of Earth Science & Engineering - Faculty of Engineering
Imperial College London

Cold region computational poromechanics

Steve Waiching Sun, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Columbia University

Dr. Steve Sun is an associate professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia University. He received his PhD from Northwestern in 2011. From 2011 to 2013, He worked as a research engineer at Sandia National Laboratories. Sun’s research focuses on computational mechanics and scientific machine learning for material modeling. He received several awards, including the Walter Huber Prize and da Vinci Award from ASCE, the John Argyris Award from IACM, and the Zienkiewicz Numerical Methods in Engineering Prize from the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). He has served as an editor of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering since April 2025.