Latest news and research from MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Cambridge, Mass.
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Using a high-speed airgap flash imaging, postdoc Bavand Keshavarz, graduate student Michela Geri, and Professor Gareth H. McKinley captured two identical fast liquid jets colliding in minute detail. mitsha.re/jty330n1fmI #fluiddynamics
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Members of the MIT GEAR Lab - including Collin Goldbach, Urvaksh Irani, Jon Bessette, Georgia Van de Zande and Fiona Grant - kicked off summer with a classic experiment to see how many rubber bands could fit around a watermelon before it exploded (850 in their case!) 🍉
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Associate Professor Ming Guo has been granted tenure. He is a recognized leader at the intersection of cell mechanics and soft matter physics.
📸: John Freidah
ALT Ming Guo teaches in front of chalk board
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Assistant Professor @DrRituRaman and her team at The Raman Lab use biological materials and engineering tools to assemble cells into living neuromuscular tissues for applications ranging from medicine to machines. mitsha.re/9UHx50IE39y
📸:: Tony Pulsone
ALT Ritu Raman
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After a number of years at MIT MechE, administrative assistant Tony Pulsone has picked up a thing or two about design and engineering principles. He put those skills into practice when making his daughter Daphne’s AT-ST Walker costume for Halloween.
Credit: Tony Pulsone
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Dr. Simona Socrate has been awarded a Mechanical Engineering Exceptional Educator Award for pioneering digital learning and pedagogical innovations, and extraordinarily effective and dedicated teaching of core undergraduate mechanics.
📸: MIT MechE
ALT Simona Socrate writes an equation on a chalk board
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Assistant Professor @DrRituRaman was recently awarded the National Science Foundation @NSF CAREER Award. This grant supports the Raman Lab's research, pedagogy, and outreach focused on building with biology #biofabrication.
ALT Ritu Raman portrait
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A team led by Professor Mathias Kolle has developed a technique that gives materials “structural color." When stretched, colors can shift and change. This technique opens the door to manufacturing devices like pressure-monitoring bandages as seen below. mitsha.re/JA2L50K9RF3
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Last week, we were pleased to welcome @DrRituRaman as an assistant professor on our faculty! An expert in medical devices and soft robotics, her research focuses on building adaptive machines powered by living biological materials. mitsha.re/MNDS50FNeX9
📸: Tony Pulsone
ALT Ritu Raman
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Last week, department head Professor Evelyn Wang served as officiant for the wedding of MechE graduate student Yajing Zhao and recent EECS alum Shichao Yue. Shichao's advisor, Professor Dina Katabi, served as a witness and gave him his doctoral hood.
📸: Tony Pulsone
ALT Yajing Zhao and Shichao Yue celebrate their wedding on Killian Court
ALT Professor Evelyn Wang officiates the wedding of Yajing Zhao and Shichao Yue
ALT Professor Dina Katab gives Shichao Yue his doctoral robe
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Congratulations to Professor @garethmckinley who has been selected as the recipient of the 2022 @SocEngScience G.I. Taylor Medal for his seminal contributions to the development of viscoelastic fluid mechanics through a unique combination of experiments and theory.
ALT SES logo, 2022 G.I. Taylor Medal Recipient, Gareth McKinley
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In November, alumna Shabnam Raayai Ardakani SM '13, PD '18, PhD '18 became the second woman ever to receive the Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics mitsha.re/vqjn30mYOGm @APSphysics
Photo by Emani Rashad
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In a recent groundbreaking @ScienceMagazine study, a team led by Professor Gang Chen determined that the material known as cubic boron arsenide overcomes the limitations of silicon and is the best semiconductor material ever found.
Read more at mitsha.re/6sFV50Kg9lx
ALT Gang Chen
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Wishing our students the very best of luck during finals week!
ALT Tim the Beaver in front of Kresge
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"I'm super thankful for the MIT MechE department for giving me the perfect environment to grow as an engineer. Spending many happy nights in lab prototyping my mechanical designs and iterating my navigation algorithms sparked my love for mechatronics."
- Rima Rebei '21
ALT Rima Rebei
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Ellen Roche has been promoted to Associate Professor. Roche is a rising star at the interfaces of biomechanics, medical devices, soft robotics, and engineering design and modeling.
She has developed new innovative technologies that support or repair impaired organ functions.
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Xuanhe Zhao has been promoted to Full Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Zhao is an international leader in the field of mechanics of soft materials.
📸: John Freidah
ALT Professor Xuanhe Zhao stretches a piece of hydrogel material used in his research.
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Assistant Professor @DrRituRaman has been awarded an @MIT_Picower Aging Brain Initiative seed grant for her work investigating the possible disruption of intercellular messages in #ALS.
Read more at mitsha.re/M0GB50J6w32
📸 Gretchen Ertl
ALT Ritu Raman
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This simulation shows a #cancer cell migrating from a soft location in the extracellular matrix to a stiff location. The video uses a new tool to understand the mechanics of metastasis described in a @PNASNews study mitsha.re/pKOH30hyNSo
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QS World University Rankings has ranked MIT as number one in mechanical engineering and manufacturing for 2021! mitsha.re/ppBg50DXkjX
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It is with profound sadness that we share that alum Steven Keating SM '12 PhD '16 has passed away at the age of 31. His courageous battle with brain cancer and advocacy for open-sourcing patient data will continue to serve as an inspiration to us all mitsha.re/ob2950v8oVq
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The @RoySocChem has awarded @ProfZhaoMIT the 2022 Soft Matter Lectureship for significant contributions to the soft matter field.
📸: :Alex Gagne
ALT Xuanhe Zhao
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Nimbus, an EV built by @mitSolarCar, making a grand entrance on Mass Ave, fresh off its win at the American Solar Challenge!
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Professor @garethmckinley has been elected as a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science. McKinley has made outstanding contributions to viscoelastic fluid mechanics, understanding flow instabilities and stretching flows.
mitsha.re/Jfq650OxFJ5
📸 MIT ILP
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Today, Robyn Goodner of @projectmanus braved 60 mph wind gusts and driving rain to deliver 4,500 MIT-designed face shields to local Boston hospitals and first responders. #OneMIT
📸: Robyn Goodner
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Using machine-learning and sensory hardware, Associate Professor Alberto Rodriguez and members of MIT's MCube lab have developed a robot that is learning how to play the game Jenga® #RoboWeek
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Sangbae Kim has been promoted to Full Professor. An internationally renowned leader in high-performance bio-inspired robotics, Kim is known for his award-winning Cheetah quadrupedal robots. #robotics
📸: Getty Images for TechCrunch
ALT Professor Sangbae Kim presenting on stage and demonstrating his robotic cheetah.
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For her PhD thesis, recent graduate Reshma Rao worked on storing intermittent renewable energy by using it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Her research focused on developing more active catalysts for the water splitting reaction.
📸: Tony Pulsone
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Professor Yang Shao-Horn spends time on @ClimateMIT's Ask MIT Climate Series and discusses lithium-ion battery manufacturing and the importance of finding climate friendly technology alternatives. mitsha.re/80Vz50I7l5E
ALT Yang Shao-Horn teaching battery course
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In honor of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, this week we will be highlighting some of our mechanical engineering alumni who have gone on to become astronauts #Apollo50th
📸: NASA
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Yesterday, MIT donated 1,000 face shields to the Cambridge Fire Department. The face shields can be quickly assembled and add an extra layer of protection for firefighters responding to Covid-19 related medical situations #OneMIT
📸: @CambridgeMAFire
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Last week, MechE PhD student Somayajulu Dhulipala tested a new irrigation system for space on a Zero-G flight. The system combines the mental health benefits of gardening with the practical utility of growing plants for long-haul space flights.
📸: @SomuDhulipala
ALT Somayajulu Dhulipala floats while holding his irrigation system on a Zero-G flight
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The inFORM Shape Display can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way. For her UROP, MechE junior Lauren Platt is working with @medialab and @KenNakagaki to renew and maintain inFORM mitsha.re/H4Ey50EgUnp
🎥: Lauren Platt
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Using #AI and sensory hardware, Assistant Professor Alberto Rodriguez and members of MIT's MCube lab have developed a #robot that is learning how to play the game Jenga mitsha.re/Abrv30nw5wV
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The MIT Hyperloop II team, which includes a number of MechE students, overcame obstacles - including a vehicle fire - and placed first among U.S. universities at 2019 @SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition mitsha.re/jxvP50w6Ooy
📸: @MITHyperloopII
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Students taking class 2.680, Unmanned Marine Vehicle Autonomy, Sensing and Communications, make final adjustments before launching an unmanned
marine vehicle on the Charles River for their final project mitsha.re/ZRw230kzxSB Image: Michael Benjamin #AI #AUV #oceanography
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Lydia Bourouiba has been elected Fellow of the @APSphysics for fundamental work in quantitatively elucidating the mechanisms of droplet impact and pioneering a new field at the intersection of fluid dynamics and transmission of respiratory and foodborne pathogens.
ALT Lydia Bourouiba
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MIT @techreview featured @ProfZhaoMIT for his team's impacts on global health. Zhao’s work with hydrogels marries engineering & medicine by inventing soft things to solve hard problems. Rising Stars, Hyunwoo Yuk, Sarah Wu, & Yoonho Kim were also featured. mitsha.re/9y6P50I3zvJ
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Starting today - learn from MIT faculty and lecturers about fluid mechanics for applications in hydraulics, aero and hydrodynamics as well as the chemical process industries in the MIT edX online course 2.25.1x, Advanced Fluid Mechanics: Fundamentals. mitsha.re/hehL50Fk2gU
ALT Close up image of water moving
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MechE grad students Carolyn Sheline and Fiona Grant are creating an adaptive controller for solar-powered drip irrigation systems on small farms in arid regions of the world. This can increase crop productivity, mitigate overwatering, and optimize system energy consumption.
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PhD candidate Georgia Van de Zande visited farmers in Kenya to learn more about their current #irrigation practices. Georgia and her fellow researchers in MIT's GEAR Lab hope to successfully introduce drip irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa.
📸: Elliott Donlon
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Third year MechE students Megan Ochalek and Srimayi Tenali pose on a cliff overlooking the Treasury of Petra. They are teaching mechanical engineering and design to high schoolers in Amman as part of MISTI Global Teaching Labs #studyabroad #STEMeducation #petra
📸: Alex Miller
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MechE grad student and MathWorks fellow Shashank Agarwal uses MATLAB to model the way vehicles move through granular materials such as sand and gravel.
Read more via @MITEngineering: mitsha.re/HogG50FjStO
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Professor Gang Chen has been named a Highly Cited Researcher for 2022 by Clarivate, having written papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for a field. Chen is an expert in heat transfer, energy conversion, and nanotechnology.
📷 Tony Pulsone
ALT Portrait of Gang Chen in Building 7 of MIT
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Grad student Paul Lilin is a 2021 @APSphysics/DFD Milton van Dyke Award Winner! In this poster, the team demonstrates a graphic way of visualizing the dynamics of drying for millimeter-sized drops of a suspension of polystyrene nanoparticles in water. mitsha.re/GgwS50GYBAb
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The standoff of all standoffs😂 MechE's mini cheetah met a friend outside the Engineering@MIT expo today!
@MITEngineering @MIT
#robotics #biomimetics
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Professor Evelyn Wang has been named a Highly Cited Researcher for 2022 by Clarivate, having written papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for a field. She is a pioneer in thermal management, energy conversion, and storage.
ALT Evelyn Wang portrait
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Professor Yang Shao-Horn has received a Humboldt Research Award, given by @hiig_berlin to researchers who work outside of Germany in recognition of their lifetime research achievements. Shao-Horn is an expert in electrochemical energy storage and conversion.
📸: @mit_dmse
ALT Yang Shao-Horn
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Graduate student Sarah Wu received a Baxter Young Investigator Award for 2021. Sarah works with @ProfZhaoMIT to investigate soft materials for biomedical applications. Her research focuses on development of a 3D printable tissue adhesive with tunable properties for wound repair.
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Irmgard Bischofberger, a rising star in the area of pattern formation in fluids and soft materials, has been promoted to Associate Professor. Learn more about her work at mitsha.re/zjK350IAMog
📸: Tony Pulsone
ALT Irmgard Bischofberger
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Associate Professor @ellentroche has been named a 2023 winner of MIT’s annual Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award. The award recognizes exceptional distinction in teaching, research, and service.
📸: M. Scott Brauer
mitsha.re/fkYb50NNQyV.
ALT Ellen Roche
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Betar Gallant has been promoted to Associate Professor. Gallant specializes in advanced chemistries and materials for electrochemical energy storage and CO2 emissions mitigation. She provided key scientific underpinnings for a new class of metal-gas primary battery.
ALT Betar Gallant in the lab
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Hydrogen production is responsible for ~2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Grad student Seiji Engelkemier is working on a process called methane pyrolysis and is focused on separating the liquid metal from hydrogen and carbon to enable continuous operation.
📸Tony Pulsone
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MIT engineers have designed a microfluidic platform that connects engineered tissue from up to 10 organs, allowing them to replicate human-organ interactions. Image: Felice Frankel mitsha.re/OSKw30jgzSx
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Last week, the department hosted the 2021 Rising Stars in Mechanical Engineering Workshop. This two-day event aimed to prepare over thirty women graduate students and postdocs from across the country for a career in academia. #WomenInSTEM
ALT Department Head Evelyn Wang speaks with students
ALT Ritu Raman at Rising Stars 2021
ALT Panelists answer Rising Stars Questions
ALT Breakout groups at Rising Stars 2021
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MechE Professor Sangbae Kim and graduate student Liam Ackerman with a Mini Cheetah Bot talking shop in Kim’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab.
📸: Tony Pulsone
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Asegun Henry, an international thermal science and engineering leader, has been promoted to Full Professor. Henry has made breakthrough advances in nanoscale heat transfer and high-temperature energy systems.
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Evelyn Wang has been appointed a Ford Professor of Engineering, which are awarded to outstanding faculty members who are recognized as leaders and innovators in their chosen disciplines. Wang's research focuses on high-efficiency energy and water systems.
📸: John Freidah
ALT Evelyn Wang
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For his undergraduate thesis, MechE grad student Ruben Castro Ornelas ’22 designed and built a first iteration of a piano-playing robot. He programmed the robot to play @iamwill's song “This Is Love", and he is working on version 2, which will be fully autonomous.
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In a new Soft Matter study, a team including Assistant Professor Irmgard Bischofberger study the growth morphology and symmetry selection of interfacial instabilities in anisotropic environments using symmetric lattice of channels on a Hele-Shaw cell mitsha.re/TG0250DbM70
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What gives a musical genre its sound? What caused deflategate? How much thermoelectric energy is produced from a hot shower?
These are some of the questions students try to answer in their final project for class 2.671, Measurement Instrumentation.
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Tomorrow marks the end of another successful summer at the MIT Women’s Technology Program, a rigorous four-week experience where female high school students explore engineering through hands-on classes, labs, and team-based projects #WomeninSTEM
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Assistant Professor Ellen Roche has been awarded a Trailblazer Award for New and Early Stage Investigators by @NIBIBgov. With the award, Roche will pursue research that integrates engineering and the physical sciences with the life and behavioral sciences.
📸: Tony Pulsone
ALT Ellen Roche stands in lab
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MechE PhD candidate Crystal Owens spent part of her summer vacation unwinding on her family farm in Wisconsin. She put her engineering skills to good use, repairing various tools and equipment around the house and farm.
📸: Sarah Wood
ALT Crystal Owens takes copper wire from a broken shopvac
ALT Crystal Owens takes copper wire from a broken shopvac
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Graduate student Michael West has been named a 2022-2023 Takeda Fellow. West’s research focuses on investigating human dexterous manipulation of complex objects in an effort to design better control algorithms for robots involved in rehabilitation & prosthetics.
📸 Tony Pulsone
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MechE alum Yoonho Kim SM '18 PhD '22, was named the inaugural "SVINovation Challenge" winner by the Society of Vascular and Interventional Neurology. Kim has been working with Professor Xuanhe Zhao on soft medical robots for teleoperated and autonomous stroke treatments.
ALT Yoonho Kim with robot
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Yang Shao-Horn was recently named the JR East Professor of Engineering. Shao-Horn is renowned for cutting-edge fundamental and engineering research related to electrochemical science and technologies for energy storage and decarbonization of chemicals and fuels.
📸 Tony Pulsone
ALT Maria Shao-Horn
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Professor Domitilla del Vecchio has been elected as a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control for contributions to developing control theory in molecular systems biology.
📸: Tony Pulsone
ALT Woman in front of white board
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Watch as eight teams of mechanical engineering students present new product prototypes, centered around the theme “danger,” live from MIT’s Kresge Auditorium - facebook.com/mitmeche/ #009danger
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The @NSF selected @CarlosMPortela to receive the 2022 CAREER Award, its most prestigious award for junior faculty. This allows Portela to research the mechanical response of self-architected materials which show great promise for achieving unparalleled mechanical properties.
ALT Carlos Portela
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Members of @mitSolarCar including MechE sophomore Jonathan Roach drove over a thousand miles on the historic Santa Fe Trail this summer. Here they are seen charging their first-place winning car "Nimbus" in the high deserts of Colorado on Day 3 of the race.
📸: Jonathan Roach
ALT Solar Car Team charges their car in the Colorado desert
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MechE grad student Arianna Ilvonen demonstrates a marine coastal monitoring robot she has developed at the MechE Health of the Planet Showcase earlier this month.
Learn more about the MechE Health of the Planet Initiative at mitsha.re/Vuzs50ISC9G
📸: Tony Pulsone
ALT Arianna Ilvonen demonstrates a marine coastal monitoring robot
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.@ProfZhaoMIT has been named a Highly Cited Researcher for 2022 by Clarivate. Zhao aims to advance science and technology between humans and machines to address grand societal challenges in health and sustainability.
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Professor Alberto Rodriguez with Doctoral Candidate Sangwoon Kim in Rodrigue’s MCube (Manipulation and Mechanisms Laboratory) working on a robot’s sense of touch to correctly insert a square peg into a square hole rather than an incorrectly shaped circular hole.
📸Tony Pulsone
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Welcome to Course 2, Class of 2025! This morning the MechE Undergraduate Office kicked off the academic year and hosted 130 sophomores for an orientation.
📸: @garethmckinley
ALT Classroom filled with people
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Grad student Palak Bharat Patel is testing nanoengineered multifunctional composites in the NECSTLAB & at the @esrfsynchrotron by performing tensile testing & synchrotron radiation micro-computed tomography to map damage progression in composites with integrated carbon nanotubes.
ALT Palak Bharat Patel in the lab
ALT ESRF Synchrotron
ALT Group photo at ESRF
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This week, Prof. Gareth McKinley (left) and Prof. Markus Buehler (right) were both honored by the @SocEngScience.
McKinley won the G.I. Taylor Medal for research contributions to fluid mechanics and Buehler won the James R. Rice Medal for having substantial impact in his field🏅
ALT Two men pose in front of statues
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Faculty and teaching staff at MIT are piloting new methods of teaching hands-on, project-based mechanical engineering classes this semester mitsha.re/kOLJ50BXI6c
📸: John Freidah and Andrea Lehn
ALT Rohit Karnik and Ken Kamrin stand in front of a blackboard with cameras and screens in front of them
ALT Simona Socrate carries boxes on MIT's campus
ALT Materials from an at home tool kit
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A machine learning tool combs the internet searching for notable women scientists and engineers - including MechE's department head Evelyn Wang - who don't have Wikipedia pages and creates one for them mitsha.re/jfde30lpUI0 #WomeninSTEM
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Associate Professor Themistoklis Sapsis has been awarded the Bodossaki Award on Basic Sciences in Mathematics. The award is given to a Greek scientist to reward their commitment and efforts to the advancement of science.
📸: Tony Pulsone
ALT Themis Sapsis teches in front of chalk board
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In a new @PhysRevLett study, Professor Kripa Varanasi and grad student Victor Julio Leon used extreme high-speed photography to reveal the details of moving droplets as they propel across a heated oily surface 100 times faster than on bare metal. journals.aps.org/prl/abstrac…
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In a recent @NatureComms study, a team led by @ellentroche designed a new drug-delivery system with an actuator that repeatedly inflates and deflates, preventing the buildup of scar tissue.
Learn more: mitsha.re/ml5V50Kl6bQ
ALT Graphic of actuator system
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Professor Domitilla del Vecchio has been granted a Newton Award for Transformative Ideas during the COVID-19 Pandemic by the @DeptofDefense for her work "Understanding and Re-engineering Epigenetic Cell Memory: A Theory-driven Approach." mitsha.re/aRux50AAktS
📸: Tony Pulsone
ALT Domitillia del Vecchio stands in front of a dry erase board
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A team of researchers including Associate Professor Mathias Kolle have found that clear water droplets can produce brilliant colors, an effect that could be harnessed for light displays, litmus tests, or makeup products mitsha.re/KdTP30ocaQ7
Image courtesy of the researchers
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A message from our Department Head, Professor Evelyn Wang, to MechE students on the first day of remote learning.
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MechE seniors Sarah Tress and Shannon McCoy spent two weeks at @PittTweet testing a wheelchair seat cushion they designed. To test the cushion, a cyclic loader sat on it 17,500 times in 8 hours to simulate one year of use #assistivetech
Video: Sarah Tress
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In honor of Chinmay Kulkarni's PhD defense, the MSEAS group held a socially distant celebration in Killian Court - and made patterns to represent the flow map composition and Lagrangian material coherence theory developed in Chinmay’s thesis.
📸: Pierre Lermusiaux
ALT People celebrating in front of MIT's dome
ALT Bird's eye view of people standing in circle
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Orisa Coombs, a senior in MechE, hopes to reduce inequality on a local and global scale through her research and student leadership roles mitsha.re/EKfF50DsJ0M
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QS ranks MIT as the world’s No. 1 university for 2023-24. Ranking at the top for the 12th year in a row, the Institute also places first in 11 subject areas, including Mechanical Engineering.
mitsha.re/7Yw550PbBvH
📸Jake Belcher
ALT Building 7 Entrance of MIT columns
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Earlier today, @theNAEng announced that Professor @garethmckinley has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering for contributions in rheology, understanding of complex fluid dynamical instabilities, and interfacial engineering of super-repellent textured surfaces.
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During IAP, MechE junior Maya Nielan is in Ghana along with fellow MIT students Andrea Diaz, Ellie Simonson, and Jessica Quaye, inspiring future female engineers through @MISTIatMIT Global Teaching Labs at Wesley Girls High School, an all-girls boarding school. 📸: Maya Nielan
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Professor Martin Culpepper provides caution on the use of 3D printing to make masks and other PPE for individuals on the front lines of the #COVID19 crisis news.mit.edu/2020/3q-risks-u…
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Assistant Professor Ritu Raman designs motor control components to heal wounds and animate “soft” robots.
mitsha.re/aM6J50LIh8n
📸 L'Oreal USA
ALT Ritu Raman in the lab
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