General Information
The Graduate Program in Mechanics offers programs
of study leading to the degrees of Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy.
Students with backgrounds in the mathematical sciences, the mechanics of
materials, physics, or theoretical chemistry are encouraged to apply.
Courses offered by the program introduce students to the
mathematical foundations, the physical basis, and the principal applications
of modern theories of the mechanics and thermodynamics of materials.
Among the subjects covered are non-linear elasticity and viscoelasticitiy,
the hydrodynamics of non-Newtonian fluids, the thermodynamics of materials
with memory, the dynamics of surface evolution, the foundations of the
theory of elastic rods, and applications of rod theory in DNA research.
In accord with the interdisciplinary nature of the program,
its students often take courses offered by the Graduate Program in Mechanical
and Aerospace Engineering and courses in analysis and applied mathematics
offered by the Graduate Program in Mathematics. It is not unusual for the
students doing research on continuum models of biological molecules to
take courses in biophysical chemistry, offered by the Graduate Program
in Chemistry, that give an introduction to the principles of protein and
nucleic acid structure and function.
Equilibrium states of a single miniplasmid (a small ring of DNA)
These equilibrium configurations were calculated using exact
and explicit solutions of the governing equations of Kirchhoff's theory
of elastic rods, with self-contact taken into account. Each transition
path from the metastable state I to the stable state
II is
characterized by an unstable equilibrium intermediate that determines the
height of the energy barrier for the path. The red arrows show two paths
from I to II which, for the choice of parameters employed
here, have energy barriers of minimum height. (From: B.D. Coleman,
D. Swigon, and I. Tobias, Elastic stability of DNA configurations: II.
Supercoiled plasmids with self-contact,
Phys. Rev. E 61,
759-770 (2000).)
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Research Facilities
The faculty members of the program are drawn from several
departments and have access to all the facilities of those departments.
The program is enriched by the large variety of seminars and conferences
held at the University.
Computers
Available to the students in the program are two Sun Sparc
workstations and several Macintosh computers; an additional Sun Enterprise
5 server and Sun Ultra 10 workstation are being installed at this time.
Shared access to the resources of the Engineering
Computing Services (ECS) and the Center
for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP) at Rutgers is also available.
The resources of ECS include two Sun E450 servers providing NFS service
for 60 Ultra 10 workstations. CAIP has recently acquired two Sun
HPC-10000 high performance parallel computers (each with 64 SPARC 400MHz
processors, Gigaplane-XB Interconnect with a 12.8 Gbytes/sec data bandwidth
and less than 500 ns constant latency, 32Gbytes of RAM, and approximately
1000 Gbyte of disk space); the combined peak performance of these two parallel
machines is circa 90 GFLOPS.
Libraries
Rutgers University
library system, with holdings of almost three million volumes, rank
among the twenty largest university research libraries in the United States.
The Mathematical Sciences Library is adjacent to the building containing
the program offices. The Mathematics Library of Rutgers University, which
is within a 3 minute walk from the Chemistry and Engineering Buildings,
holds a collection that includes 35,000 monographs, 688 journal subscriptions,
and more than 23,000 bound journals. The collection of the Rutgers
University Library of Science and Medicine, on the same campus, includes
over 448,000 bound volumes and 6,600 journal subscriptions.
Data Banks
The Wright-Riemann Chemistry Laboratories at Rutgers University
are the home of two international centers for the processing and distribution
of 3-D macromolecular structural data determined by X-ray crystallography
and NMR: the Nucleic
Acid Database and the new Protein
Data Bank (funded by NSF, NIH, and DOE).
The University
As a university strongly committed to graduate education
and research, Rutgers, The State University
of New Jersey, provides graduate programs of exceptional academic quality
taught by a distinguished faculty. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers is now one
of the nation's premier research institutions and a member of the select
Association of American Universities.
The Graduate School
- New Brunswick offers master's degrees in 63 disciplines and doctoral
degrees in 54. The large graduate student community (almost 5,000 in the
Graduate School - New Brunswick, of whom more than half are in residence
at any given time) is engaged in the larger national research community
through active lecture and seminar series, attendance at conferences, and
cooperative endeavors with nearby institutions, especially Princeton University
and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
Rutgers' proximity to both New York City and Philadelphia
is a notable asset for the cultural and academic opportunities these cities
afford.
Financial Aid
Rutgers offers a variety of assistantships, fellowships,
and scholarships to qualified graduate students with strong records of
academic achievement and scholarly promise. The Graduate School - New Brunswick
and the School of Engineering administer major fellowships that carry tuition
remission and stipends. Many other forms of financial aid are available.
Students should submit applications by March 1 to be considered for the
fall term.
Applications
Application forms can be downloaded
from Rutgers website or requested
electronically from the Office of Graduate and Professional Admissions
at Rutgers, or from the office of the Graduate Program in Mechanics, 98
Brett Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8058. Applicants must submit results of
the Graduate Record Examination's general test; the subject test in engineering,
physics, or mathematics is recommended. The deadline for submission of
applications for fall term admission is May 1; spring term applications
must be submitted by December 1.