Faculty Profiles

SURESH ADVANI has made a significant scientific impact through a mixture of research, education, and leadership. His leadership in the composites manufacturing area, in particular, has helped Delaware earn a number of multi-million-dollar grants over the last three decades, and has contributed to the success of UD’s renowned Center for Composite Materials. Process modeling tools developed by Advani’s lab are now considered a crucial component to address the challenges and gaps in the advancement of composites. In addition, starting in 2004, he helped establish a fuel cell bus program with Professor Ajay Prasad, which has resulted in contributions in fuel cells, batteries, hydrogen generation and storage in addition to testing with a fleet of fuel cell buses on the UD campus.

Advani is a Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers and is the North American Editor for the journal Composites A: Applied Science and Manufacturing. He is also a prolific writer, having co-authored nearly 300 refereed journal papers, co-authored or edited six books, and holding three patents. He received the American Society of Composites Outstanding Research Award for his exceptional contributions.

Advani has created an educational legacy as well. He has mentored more than 85 graduate students.  When he served as department chair, he made significant improvements to undergraduate education, including a renewed focus toward hands-on and interdisciplinary learning accomplished through the creation of the maker space (i.e. the Design Studio), increased department funding for undergraduate researchers, and the integration of other engineering majors alongside mechanical engineering students in our Senior Design capstone course. He was awarded the graduate Student Mentoring Award in 2008 and was recognized as the Educator of the year by the Society of Plastic Engineers in 2015.

JENNI BUCKLEY’s research focuses on the development and mechanical evaluation of orthopaedic, neurosurgical and pediatric devices. She is also interested in mechanical testing standards, academic-industry research partnerships, and mentoring practices in engineering.

A graduate of the University of Delaware, she went on to earn master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked on computational and experimental methods in spinal biomechanics.

She joined the UD faculty in 2011 and now teaches a range of courses as part of the undergraduate curriculum, including the senior design capstone course, in which students collaborate across disciplines to solve a broad range of real problems.

Buckley received UD’s Excellence in Advising and Mentoring Award in 2013, an Excellence in Teaching Award in 2016, and she is the Delaware state leader for Project Lead the Way, which provides hands-on, project-based STEM curricula and high-quality teacher professional development through a network of corporate and community partners.

Buckley is very involved in issues of gender diversity in engineering. She is co-founder and president of The Perry Initiative, a nonprofit outreach sponsor encouraging women to pursue careers in engineering and orthopaedic surgery. In 2015, she was awarded the E. Arthur Trabant Award for Women’s Equity for her work with The Perry Initiative, which was founded in 2009 and now reaches 1,700 young women nationwide annually.

TSU WEI CHOU—considered a pioneer in the field of composite materials and named among the top 100 materials scientists of the past decade—has conducted research worldwide in the areas of materials science, applied mechanics, fiber composite materials, piezoelectric materials and nanocomposites.

His most recent work focuses on the development of advanced materials for use in supercapacitors. In one project, he demonstrated the use of graphene films, produced via chemical vapor deposition for this application. Due to their exceptional flexibility and transparency, CVD graphene films have been regarded as an ideal replacement of indium tin oxide for transparent electrodes, especially in applications where electronic devices may be subjected to large tensile strain. However, the search for a desirable combination of stretchability, and electrochemical performance of such devices, remains challenging. Chou and colleagues recently demonstrated the implementation of a laminated ultrathin CVD graphene film as a stretchable and transparent electrode for supercapacitors.

His team also successfully developed stretchable wire-shaped supercapacitors based on continuous carbon nanotube fibers. The remarkable stretchability was accomplished through a prestraining-then-buckling approach. The researchers reported a unique combination of outstanding electrochemical performance and stretchability with this type of supercapacitor. Their findings should facilitate the potential integration of wire-shaped supercapacitors with miniaturized and portable electronic devices.

JOE FESER’s MuTT (Microscale Thermal Transport) Lab focuses on understanding how heat propagates through materials at microscopic length scales. Using that information, he engineers new materials and interfaces that have extreme heat transfer abilities.

Using ultrafast lasers, Feser’s lab characterizes heat transfer on femtosecond timescales— and, since heat can’t move very far on short timescales, that also means that heat transfer can be confined to nanoscale distances, where much of the fundamental physics can be observed.

Ultrafast lasers can even be used to detect heat transfer resistance across a single atomic layer. Feser is currently using that capability to investigate how atomic vibrations—called “phonons” because of their similarity to light or “photon” properties—interact at abrupt interfaces between materials. Interfaces are common in high-tech devices like computer chips, next-generation hard drives, and military-grade amplifiers. In many cases, heat dissipation across interfaces represents a performance bottleneck, which Feser’s lab works to address.

He is also developing computational tools to simulate atomic vibrations and their heat-carrying capabilities. These tools can be used to investigate scattering of vibrational energy from nanoparticles in composite materials, with the goal of raising the efficiency of thermoelectric devices.

JILL HIGGINSON leads research aimed at improving understanding of muscle coordination for normal and pathological movements through coupled experimental and simulation studies.

Higginson’s group uses state-of-the-art modeling and optimization techniques to develop a cause-and-effect framework that relates muscle impairments to gait deviations. Experiments involve three-dimensional kinematic and kinetic analysis and electromyography (EMG) recording during treadmill and overground gait. Modeling and optimization are used to develop simulations based on experimental data.

Ongoing research projects are related to muscle deficits and subject-specific interventions for post-stroke hemiparetic gait, simulation-based analysis of muscle coordination in healthy and pathological gait, and interactions between cognitive function and gait performance. Recent papers have focused on measurements of propulsion and dynamic structure of lower limb joint angles during walking post-stroke.

The overarching goal of the work is to form a scientific rationale for therapeutic interventions to improve movement. Higginson is also co-PI with X. Lucas Lu on an NSF program to provide a biomechanics research experience for undergraduate students on the UD campus each summer.

GUOQUAN HUANG leads the UD Robot Perception and Navigation Group, where the research efforts are driven by the desire to understand intelligence and develop robots that better serve people—for example, autonomous systems for search and rescue—and augment human capabilities, such as working in dangerous or inaccessible environments. The group’s mission is to enable robots to understand their surroundings so as to navigate autonomously, safely and efficiently in any environment.

To this end, their research has been primarily focusing on probabilistic localization, mapping, estimation and control of autonomous ground, aerial and underwater vehicles. Theoretically, they seek to design and develop robust, efficient, consistent, secure state estimation and control algorithms for various perception and navigation problems.

Huang earned master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science (robotics) from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities in 2009 and 2012, respectively. He joined the UD faculty after serving as a postdoctoral associate with the Marine Robotics Group in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

He received the 2006 Academic Excellence Fellowship from the University of Minnesota, the 2011 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad, and the 2013 MIT Postdoctoral Associate Travel Award. He recently received funding from the National Science Foundation and the University of Delaware Cybersecurity Initiative for research aimed at achieving attack-resilient, resource-aware, consistent drone navigation.

X. LUCAS LU and his collaborators are addressing several bioengineering problems. The first is prevention of post-trauma osteoarthritis. Although arthritis is generally associated with aging, it can also result from the type of trauma experienced by young soldiers and athletes. With support from the Department of Defense, Lu has teamed with surgeons and biologists to study the effectiveness of statins in the treatment and prevention of osteoarthritis. Statins are FDA-approved and prescribed to hundreds of millions of people in the US for cholesterol control. Lu’s group is also performing a big data study to analyze the statin use and osteoarthritis occurrence in the Delaware population.

He is also investigating the mechanics and lubrication of the temporomandibular joint (TMJ). Using novel mechanical technology and finite element simulation, Lu is studying the structure-function correlation of the cartilaginous tissues in the TMJ and its lubrication mechanism. He is also working with a team of oral surgeons to investigate the use of natural polyphenols for the treatment of TMJ disorders.

Another area of interest for Lu is rehabilitation for microfracture surgery to repair cartilage lesions. Young athletes suffering from trauma-induced cartilage loss are often treated with microfracture surgery, a minimally invasive procedure that creates tiny punctures in the bone to stimulate bone marrow growth in the damaged area. Lu is working with physical therapists and orthopedic surgeons to optimize the rehabilitation protocol after surgery and to enhance the deposition and quality of newly repaired tissue at the injury site.

IOANNIS POULAKAKIS’ research interests are in the area of dynamics and control with application to bio-inspired robotic systems, specifically legged robots. He is also interested in problems related to the dynamics of collective decision making in multiagent systems.

Poulakakis and his team are focused on providing the necessary robotics science and technology to create dexterous, highly mobile legged robots that can autonomously plan actions in human-centric environments. They are working to develop real-time planning algorithms that can bridge the gap between a robot’s platform controls and higher-level motion planning objectives.

If successful, this research will bring highly mobile and versatile robot platforms like legged machines closer to real-life applications in industry, agriculture and emergency response. For example, in supply chain management systems, legged robots could help companies rapidly reconfigure their production or assembly lines to adapt to changes in demand or new product designs.

Similar to their counterparts in nature, small- and large-legged robots operate differently. The researchers are working with robots of different types and sizes so they can study the effect of scale on their approach.

Many natural and technological processes involve phenomena that take place over widely differing scales of time and space. Such multi-scale problems pose considerable difficulties. Porous media—which abound in modern technologies, such as drug delivery substrates, membrane reactors and chemical sensors, batteries and fuel cells—are a typical example. These heterogeneous systems involve multi-physics phenomena, such as diffusional or convective transport, and electrochemical conversion.

VALERY ROY’s research focuses on the modeling and simulation of porous media and, more generally, on multi-scale systems. He uses a combination of mathematical modeling, continuum theories and advanced computational techniques. One such mathematical technique consists of devising pre-treatments of the multi-scale system so as to make the smallest scale vanish, leaving effective macroscopic, homogeneous models, which are much simpler to simulate.

Roy has also conducted research in the area of interfacial phenomena, nonlinear dynamics and stochastic dynamics. He teaches sophomore and graduate-level courses on engineering dynamics and an advanced course in applied mathematics. He recently published undergraduate and graduate textbooks in engineering dynamics and is working on a new book project on the modeling and simulation of multi-scale systems.

Roy joined the UD faculty in 1989 after earning his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Rice University.

ERIK THOSTENSON heads the Multifunctional Composites Laboratory, which focuses on developing a fundamental understanding of the processing-structure-property relations in nanostructured materials and composites.

Key initiatives include experimental and theoretical research in processing, characterization and predictive modeling of nanocomposites. A major focus is on the development of novel and industrially scalable approaches for hybridizing nanostructures with traditional fiber reinforcements.

Working at the microscopic scale, his team is tailoring the local stiffness, strength, toughness and other properties through control of the fiber orientation, type and volume fraction. Recent advances in producing nanostructured materials with novel material properties have stimulated research to create macroscopic engineering materials by designing the structure at the nanoscale.

Thostenson’s work is highly cited in the literature, and he has received a number of awards and honors, including a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award and a Young Investigator Program Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

He is also the recipient of the Elsevier Young Composites Researcher Award from the American Society for Composites, which recognizes researchers who, early in their careers, have made a significant impact on the science and technology of composite materials through a sustained research effort.

Thostenson performed his master’s (Mechanical Engineering) and Ph.D. (Materials Science) research at UD’s Center for Composite Materials.

LIYUN WANG, who joined the department in 2005, conducts research on how mechanical forces influence the health maintenance and disease development in the body. She focuses on osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and diabetes, three diseases that inflict huge socioeconomic cost to the society. Supported by the National Institutes of Health, Wang is investigating how mechanical forces generated during physical activities are transferred to the tissue level and perceived by cells. This work may pave the way to identifying new molecular targets that could be used to improve bone’s sensitivity to exercise, with the potentials of preventing and slowing the onset of osteoporosis.

Wang also works with clinicians at Christiana Care to investigate the effectiveness of exercise in improving bone health in Type 1 diabetic patients, who are at increased risk of sustaining fractures. Wang continues to investigate the effects of diabetes on the vascular health as well, and in particular, how the disease alters the way that the inner lining of the vessel responds to forces caused by blood flow.

Wang’s research activities have provided rich training opportunities for undergraduates, graduates, and postdoctoral students. More than 50 undergraduates students have participated in undergraduate research in her laboratory. Wang also serves as Co-Director of the Cytomechanics Core, a shared facility to assist research in cell mechanics. She is a member of the Center for Biomechanical Engineering Research in UD, Orthopedic Research Society, American Society of Bone and Mineral, Biomedical Engineering Society, American Society of Engineering Education, and International Chinese Musculoskeletal Research Society.