MechSE Assistant Professor Mattia Gazzola has been awarded the distinction of Fellow of the campus’ Center for Advanced Study for the 2023-24 academic year.
CAS Fellows are untenured University of Illinois faculty members. With CAS Professors and Associates, they form the intellectual core of the Center for Advanced Study community. Fellows also participate in a yearly roundtable discussion of research interests and are invited to additional CAS events and given opportunities to present their work to the CAS community. The appointment provides one semester of release time to pursue an individual scholarly or creative project.
Gazzola has successfully leveraged interdisciplinary collaborations to lead creative, groundbreaking research at the intersection of engineering, biophysics, robotics, and control. He plans to continue his investigations into computing with living neurons – which are central to his NSF center-scale work on the “Mind in Vitro” project – but with the CAS Fellowship, he will create and utilize an in vitro auditory system, where neural responses to music will inform musical modulations, adding to the musical ‘performance.’ The creativity at the foundation of this research idea is novel – potentially impacting speech recognition, language, and more.
Gazzola earned his PhD in mechanical engineering from ETH Zurich in 2013 and joined the MechSE Department in 2016.