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New faculty bring new perspectives to contemporary themes in mechanicsTwo new faculty joined the CEGE geomechanics group in the fall of 2025. By bringing fresh perspectives on subsurface processes, material behaviors, and the mechanics of natural and engineered systems, they will advance contemporary themes in mechanics that bridge fundamental science and societal needs.These new faces join our already impressive geomechanics faculty:%u00b7 Emmanuel Detournay (NAE) %u00b7 Joseph Labuz %u00b7 Randal Barnes %u00b7 Stefano Gonella %u00b7 Bojan Guzina %u00b7 Sonia Mogilevskaya %u00b7 Otto Strack %u00b7 Vaughan Vollerarcelo Garcia, an accomplished engineer and scholar and a graduate of the University of Minnesota (MS 1985, Ph.D. 1989), was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Garcia now holds the G.T. Geoffrey Yeh Chair in Civil Engineering and is the Director of the Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems Laboratory in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. %u201cIt is an incredible honor becoming a member of the National Academy of Engineering,%u201d said Garcia. %u201cIt is not just the honor, it%u2019s knowing that all the work that you have done is recognized by the Academy as having contributed to, essentially, the well-being of people and society as a whole. The work that I do with rivers, sedimentation, and also some of the work on the coastal environment and the submarine environment, is all related to how we work with nature, how we try to understand what nature is telling us, and how we engineer our way through, preserving things and making them sustainable.%u201d Marcelo Garcia will be coming to UMN in December to be part of the Warren Distinguished Lecture Series (see page 7). Read more about Marcelo Garcia online: cse.umn.edu/cege/newsudson Borja da Rochais an expert in the physics and mechanics of materials, with emphasis on soft materials, fracture mechanics, and biophysics, and he will add depth to CEGE%u2019s teaching mission and research mission in this space. He comes to CEGE from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was a Postdoctoral Associate. Borja da Rocha received his Master%u2019s and Doctorate degrees from %u00c9cole Polytechnique, France.uanyi Lu has expertise in experimental and computational geomechanics and will strengthen this area in within CEGE. Lu was most recently a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Before that, he did research at EPFL (%u00c9cole Polytechnique F%u00e9d%u00e9rale de Lausanne) and the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia. Lu earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh in 2018.GMHMARCELO GARCIANew member of the National Academy of Engineering2 CEGE | CSE.UMN.EDU/CEGE