This mini-symposium will focus on recent advances in damage and fracture mechanics both from a theoretical and computational point of view, bringing together emerging and early-career researchers with backgrounds in engineering, physics and mathematics. Addressing the complex challenge of accurately modeling extreme mechanical behaviors — such as damage, damage to fracture transition, crack propagation, and fatigue — in both traditional and innovative materials, the mini-symposium will feature contributions that span a diverse range of methodologies and approaches, including but not limited to: - Material failure and damage; - Robust numerical methods for complex structural analyses up to failure; - Regularized gradient damage models; - Enhanced damage models; - Peridynamics and nonlocal approaches for fracture; - Sharp-interface cohesive models; - Variational and phase-field formulations for brittle and ductile fracture; - Enriched finite element methods and virtual element methods for crack simulations; - Coupling between plasticity and fracture; - Failure modeling accounting for anisotropic, cyclic loading or dynamical behaviors; - Contact-induced fracture and surface damage; - Damage and failure in composite, heterogeneous, and random materials; - Multi-scale and/or multi-physics damage problems (fracking, hydrogen embrittlement). By promoting the exchange of novel results, the symposium aims to foster dialogue and collaborations in damage and fracture mechanics research.