9/5/2024
The MechSE Department has seen unprecedented growth in our faculty roster -- both tenure-track and specialized -- surpassing many years of hiring records for the department.
Introducing 11 outstanding new faculty in MechSE
This fall, the department has welcomed seven new specialized and tenure-track faculty whose research spans a wide range of fields and areas of societal impact.
“MechSE’s faculty are truly some of the best in the world, and prospective faculty know that. It’s so important that we continue to build a critical mass of researchers here in MechSE who are addressing the world’s most pressing engineering problems,” said Department Head Tony Jacobi.
Associate Professor Craig Bradshaw joins MechSE from Oklahoma State University. His research area is in thermal systems, compressors, heat pumps, air-conditioning, refrigerant and lubricant properties, model-informed design optimization, model development, fundamentals of heat and fluid flow in thermal systems, waste-heat recovery, thermodynamics, and heat transfer. He will also serve as Executive Director of the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Center (ACRC) at Illinois.
The research of Assistant Professor C. Ricardo Constante-Amores focuses on fluid mechanics related to multiphase flows, data-driven turbulence modeling from a dynamical system point of view and Koopman theory for high-dimensional systems. He has developed a modeling framework that accounts for the presence of surfactants in multiphase systems; created low-dimensional models for canonical turbulent systems such as pipe flow and plane Couette flow; and studied the role of kidney stones in renal pelvis using patient-specific CFD models.
Nazanin Farjam is an Assistant Professor who studies process modeling and control, advanced manufacturing, printed electronics and electrohydrodynamic jet printing (EHD). She focuses on enhancing the flexibility, robustness, and efficiency of complex dynamic systems by developing modeling frameworks and intelligent control strategies to push the frontier of advanced manufacturing and optimize the behavior of systems and their components.
Teaching Assistant Professor Kellie Halloran earned her BS, MS, and PhD from MechSE, where her doctoral work focused on shoulder biomechanics during and after handcycling exercise, inverse musculoskeletal modeling, injury prevention during exercise for manual wheelchair users, and engineering education. She studied under Professor Mariana Kersh.
Kevin Wandke joins MechSE as a Teaching Assistant Professor after earning all three of his degrees from Illinois. His doctoral research was in machine learning for solving coupled PDEs as well as simulation and modeling of soft robots. He developed a method for correcting energy drift in long timescale machine learning simulations of dynamic systems.
Professor Janelle Wharry brings expertise in structure-property-functionality relationships of materials in mechanical, irradiation, electrochemical, and corrosive extreme environments. She has developed theories explaining phase transformations in steels under mechano-irradiation extremes, and her work is enabling code-qualification of advanced manufacturing methods for nuclear structural alloys. She joins MechSE from the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue University.
Assistant Professor Siyi Xu studies soft robotics, wearable and implantable sensors, electrically responsive soft actuators and fluidic systems. She has developed biocompatible soft sensors and power-dense transducers for the actuation and control of soft robots, and has demonstrated the potential of compliant, lightweight, and compact wearable robotic systems for daily assistive and therapeutic purposes.
During the 2023-24 academic year, the addition of four new faculty also brought enhanced expertise in materials design, drug transport and tissue microenvironments, sustainable manufacturing and structural engineering.