Four MechSE graduate students among this year's Mavis Future Faculty Fellows

Several MechSE graduate students have been named Mavis Future Faculty Fellows (MF3) for the 2021-22 academic year.

The MF3 Academy was developed in The Grainger College of Engineering to help prepare talented graduate students for their future transition into academia. The program focuses on research, teaching, and mentoring, offering professional development activities and workshops, significant teaching experience, and mentorship of a less experienced student.

The AY21-22 Mavis Fellowship winners from MechSE are: Charul Chadha, Sameer Mohammed, and Nabil Ramlawi.

Charul Chadha is a PhD candidate in Professor Iwona Jasiuk’s group. She studies the structure and mechanics of equine hooves, which are some of the toughest biological structures that can sustain impact loading and have the ability to deflect cracks – with their complex composite and hierarchical structure. Through the study of the structure, composition, and mechanical properties of hooves Chadha hopes to design impact-resistant bio-inspired materials. Replicating these structures under manufacturable conditions will also help develop components that can divert cracks in the desired direction.

Sameer Mohammed’s research is focused on developing predictive models for mechanical response of structural and functional materials. These models are necessary to accelerate the exploration and identification of candidate material designs capable of exhibiting superior properties and radically downsizing our energy footprint. His PhD work with Professor Huseyin Sehitoglu focuses on a class of functional materials, known as shape memory alloys, aimed at modeling the damage mechanism known as ‘functional fatigue.’  “I am thankful to the exceptional graduate program at MechSE and honored to represent our department at the Mavis Future Faculty Fellows academy this year,” Mohammed said.

Tejaswin Parthasarathy's research focuses on deploying numerical tools for design of engineering applications in the realm of inertial micro-fluidics, soft-robotics and their flow–structure interaction. These tools target engineering applications in medicine, manufacturing and robotics, from harnessing non-linear viscous streaming effects for inertial particle manipulation within fluidic systems to understanding terrestrial locomotory behaviors of snakes for bio-inspired control and maneuverability strategies for slender soft-robots. Towards this goal, he carries out research in Professor Mattia Gazzola's lab, at the intersection of continuum mechanics, theoretical modeling, numerical algorithms, high-performance computing, software-at-scale, and optimization/learning techniques.

Nabil Ramlawi studies the rheological behavior of non-Newtonian fluids and soft materials ranging from consumer products such as cheese to stimuli-responsive and precisely formulated polymer melts and networks. These materials have a broad and complicated landscape of nonlinear mechanical behavior arising from intriguing physics occurring at the micro and mesoscales. As a graduate student in Associate Professor Randy Ewoldt’s lab, Ramlawi develops characterization techniques, mathematical models, and numerical tools that help in understanding the complexity of the material response in terms of concise information relevant for engineering applications and scientific exploration of the underlying physics.