The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a strong research reputation in the fields of mechanics, micro and nanotechnology, biophysics, bioengineering, molecular scale imaging, cell and molecular biology, and biochemistry. The Center for Cellular Mechanics will bring together this rich and diverse expertise on campus to address questions related to the mechanics of intracellular phenomena focusing on mechanotransduction and disease detection. These include the mechanics of cell adhesion, motility, growth and division, intracellular transport and energy exchange, stress and deformation induced intracellular biological and adaptive response, pathogen induced cell mechanical response for disease detection, and novel instrumentations for probing intracellular signals.