Book excerpt: In the last decades, new experimental and numerical techniques have taken many advanced features of porous media mechanics down to practical engineering applications. This happened in areas that sometimes were not even suspected to be open to engineering ideas at all. The challenge that often faces engineers in the field of geomechanics, biomechanics, rheology and materials science is the translation of ideas existing in one field to solutions in the other. The purpose of the IUTAM symposium from which this proceedings volume has been compiled was to dive deep into the mechanics of those porous media that involve mechanics and chemistry, mechanics and electromagnetism, mechanics and thermal fluctuations of mechanics and biology. The different sections have purposely not been formed according to field interest, but on the basis of the physics involved.