Dr. Osama Bilal is interested in designing intelligent, autonomous and multifunctional structures and materials through understanding of correlations between geometry, symmetry, periodicity and mechanical properties. His research interests spans dynamics of structures and materials, acoustic metamaterials, soft robotics, additive manufacturing, origami, topology optimization, haptics and fluid-structure interaction. The research combines theory, numerical simulations and experiments spanning micro and macro scales. Osama received his training at Caltech, ETH Zurich, CU-Boulder and Cairo University in aerospace and mechanical engineering, computer science and condensed matter physics. His research is published in multidisciplinary outlets such as Nature, the National Academy of Sciences, Physical Review Letters, Advanced Materials, etc. His work is highlighted in national and international media, including MSNBC, ABC news, Yahoo, Science Daily, CBC and Physics Today among others. He is awarded a few patents and is recognized by several awards including the ARL postdoctoral fellowship (Army), ETH postdoctoral fellowship (ETH), the Graduate Student Service Award (CU-Boulder), the International Student Award (CU-Boulder), the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award (CU-Boulder) and the Phononics Fellowship (National Science Foundation), among others.

Visit Website

Dr. Horea Ilies is a Professor and Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department and holds a dual appointment in the Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Ilies joined the Mechanical Engineering Department in 2004 from Ford Motor Company. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of Wisconsin – Madison, and received M.S. degrees in Mechanics and ME from Michigan State University, and Technical University of Cluj, Romania. He has several years of industrial experience with Ford Motor Company in research, manufacturing, and product design and development activities. His current research interests include geometric and physical computing, shape synthesis and geometric reasoning, and, more generally, center on theoretical and computational aspects for systematic design and manufacturing of engineered systems. Dr. Ilies received the NSF CAREER award in 2007, as well as several Best Paper awards. He is an elected member of Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE) and serves as the director of the DREAM Research Center at UConn.

The central focus of our work has been on developing new engineering computational models, representations, algorithms, and design semantics to enable systematic, and efficient design, analysis and manufacturing of engineering artifacts.

Visit Website

Dr. Farhad Imani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Connecticut (UConn). He received his Dual-title Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the Pennsylvania State University in 2020. He is an expert on sensing, control and automation, computational intelligence, and cognitive learning with applications in advanced manufacturing. His research interests encompass cyber-physical systems, privacy, and cyber security.

Visit Website

Dr. SeungYeon Kang is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Connecticut. She obtained her B.A. degree from Cornell University in Chemical Engineering and received her Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from Harvard University. After her graduate studies, she worked at Samsung SDI as a senior research engineer on lithium-ion batteries and at Princeton University as a postdoctoral research associate in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department. Before becoming a faculty, she was the program manager for NSF’s SHAP3D additive manufacturing center at the University of Connecticut. Her current research interests include advanced laser materials processing techniques, fundamental principles and application of light-matter interaction, light-based additive manufacturing, 3D nanofabrication and energy technology.

Visit Website

Dr. Kazerounian joined the Mechanical Engineering Department in 1984 after receiving his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1980, 1981 and 1984, respectively. Dr. Kazerounian's expertise is in analytical and computational kinematics and dynamics applied in diverse application fields, such as protein based nano-scale mechanical devices, optimization of mechanisms and gear systems, robotics, and human motion analysis.

Visit Website

Dr. Kyungjin Kim joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Connecticut in Fall 2021. Before joining, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Lacour lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), working on chronic soft neuroprosthetic implants. She received her PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2018 and BS from KAIST, South Korea, in 2014, both in Mechanical Engineering. Her work focuses on novel thin film composite materials where optimizations and reliability analysis of fatigue and fracture of materials are required. She is currently developing long-term functioning soft and deformable electronic devices using vacuum-processed hermetic encapsulations and various quality control methods, ultimately to engineer the reliability of next-generation devices such as flexible and stretchable electronics, implantable bioelectronics both in the materials and device level.

Visit Website

Dr. Julián Norato is an Associate Professor at The University of Connecticut and a Castleman Professor in Engineering Innovation. Prior to joining UConn in 2014, he worked for Caterpillar, where he was responsible for the Product Optimization Group. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Norato is a recipient of a 2017 ONR Young Investigator Program award, a 2018 NSF CAREER Award, and the 2019 ASME Design Automation Young Investigator Award. He is a Review Editor for the Journal of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization and an Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design. He currently serves as the Chair of the ASME Design Automation Committee.

Visit Website

Dr. Jiong Tang is the Pratt & Whitney Professor of Advanced Materials and Processing in Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Connecticut. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Applied Mechanics from Fudan University, China, in 1989 and 1992, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2001. Prior to joining UConn in 2002, he worked in GE Research Center as a research engineer.

Dr. Tang has studied a series of research subjects including motion and vibration controls, sensing and signal processing, robotics and automation, uncertainty quantification and propagation analyses, design optimization, computational intelligence and machine learning, and modeling and analysis of multi-physics systems and processes. He has published over 200 papers in these areas. Dr. Tang’s research has been supported extensively by federal agencies and industrial companies. Dr. Tang is a fellow of the ASME.

Visit Website

Dr. Hongyi Xu joined University of Connecticut in 2019 as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include computational design of complex structure and microstructure systems, uncertainty quantification and propagation, Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM), stochastic microstructure characterization and reconstruction, and battery materials modeling. Dr. Xu received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2014, and worked for the Research and Advanced Engineering of Ford Motor Company from 2014 to 2019. At Ford, he led and participated in multiple research projects, including Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) of carbon fiber composites, DfAM, and vehicle body and battery safety engineering. As of March 2023, Dr. Xu serves as associate editors of three international journals. He received the NSF CAREER award, three best paper/editor’s choice awards from ASME conferences and journals, one super paper award from the tire society, and several ASME reviewer’s awards.

Visit Website