Siegfried Schmauder Professor Dr. Siegfried Schmauder is currently a Professor of Materials Science and Strength of Materials, at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He graduated in Mathematics from the University of Stuttgart in 1981, and received his Dr. rer. nat. degree from the same University in 1988. After his work as a research group leader at the Max-Planck-Insitute for Metals Research and postdoctoral research stays at the .Tokyo and at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), USA, he accepted an offer to become a Professor at the State Materials testing Agency (MPA), University of Stuttgart. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Computational Materials Science, and author of more than 300 research papers in the field of nano- and micromechanics. Leon Mishnaevsky Jr. Leon Mishnaevsky Jr. is a Senior Scientist at the Riso National Laboratory, Denmark. Prior to joining Riso, he worked as a research scientist and later as a Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Stuttgart, and at the Darmstadt University of Technology. LM received his Dr. -Ing. Habil. degree in Mechanics from the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, and his doctorate from the USSR Academy of Sciences. He has held visiting professor/visiting scholar positions at M.I.T. and Rutgers (USA), University of Tokyo (Japan), China University of Mining and Technology (China) and Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Arts et Metiers (France). He published books on "Computational mesomechanics of composites" and "Damage and fracture in heterogeneous materials", and over 100 research papers in different areas of computational mechanics of materials, micromechanics and mechanical engineering.