Leon Mishnaevsky Jr. is a Senior Scientist at the Risø National Laboratory, Denmark. Prior to joining Risø, he worked as a research scientist and later as a Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Stuttgart, and at the Darmstadt University of Technology. He received his hablitation (Dr. habil. degree) in Mechanics from the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, and his doctorate from the USSR Academy of Sciences. Dr. Mishnaevsky has held visiting professor/visiting scholar positions at M.I.T. and Rutgers (USA), University of Tokyo (Japan) and Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Arts et Metiers (France). He has published a book on "Damage and Fracture in Heterogeneous Materials" and over 100 research papers in different areas of computational mechanics of materials, micromechanics and mechanical engineering.