The faculty and staff of Mechanical Engineering are excited to announce the addition of three new faculty who will be joining us in the next year. They are Drs. Ilenia Battiato, Yue “Sophie” Wang and Huijuan “Jane Zhao.
Dr. Ilenia Battiato will be joining ME in March, 2012. Ilenia Battiato is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany. She received her first Master in Environmental Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and her second Master, and PhD in Engineering Physics at University of California, San Diego. Her research involves analytical and numerical modeling of (reactive) transport processes in crowded environments at a variety of scales with applications to environmental flows, nanotechnology, biological systems and granular matter. Current studies include fluidization threshold of wet granulates, hybrid models for flow and transport in porous media, multi-scale models of carbon nanotube forests.
Dr. Yue Wang received her Ph.D. in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in May, 2011. She received her M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2008, and her B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering and Automation from Shanghai University in 2005. Dr. Wang is a member of AIAA, IEEE, IEEE Control Systems Society, and IEEE Women in Engineering. Her research interests are in estimation and control of networked cyber-physical systems, decision-making and sensor management in distributed sensor networks, coverage control using multiple autonomous vehicles, and space-augmented space situational awareness. Dr. Wang is currently working as a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the University of Notre Dame and will join the Mechanical Engineering Department at Clemson University in July, 2012.
Dr. Huijuan “Jane” Zhao will be joining our department in January, 2012. Huijuan Zhao received her B.S. and M.S. in Engineering Mechanics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2000 and 2002, respectively. She received her PhD degree in Mechanical Science & Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010. After graduation, she became a postdoctoral research associate in the material theory group of Material Science and Technology Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Her past and ongoing research has been focusing on understanding of material properties in different length scales with the proper computational techniques, including finite element method, multi-scale simulations, molecular dynamics simulations and first principle theory studies. Her current research interests include the fundamental understanding of high performance structural materials and their potential engineering applications. She will be completing a Post-doctoral research assignment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in December.
